Anansi's Gold

The Man Who Swindled the World

By: Yepoka Yeebo

Narrated by: Jude Owusu

Bloomsbury presents Anansi's Gold by Yepoka Yeebo, read by Jude Owusu.

Winner of the Jhalak Prize & Plutarch Award | A New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, Newsweek, TIME Book of the Year 2023
‘Fabulously entertaining’ Daily Telegraph | ‘Perfect for fans of Frank Abignale Jr.’s Catch Me If You Can’ Publishers Weekly
The astounding, never-before-told story of how an ingenious Ghanaian con artist ran one of the 20th century’s longest and most audacious frauds.

When Ghana declared independence from Britain in 1957, it immediately became a target for opportunists determined to lay hold of whatever assets colonialism hadn’t already stripped. The military ousted the new nation’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, then falsely accused him of stealing the country’s gold and hiding it overseas.

Into this story stepped one of history’s most charismatic scammers, John Ackah Blay-Miezah – a con man to rival the trickster god Anansi. Born into poverty, Blay-Miezah declared himself the custodian of an alleged Nkrumah trust fund worth billions. You, too, could claim a piece, if only you would help him rescue it – with a small investment. Over the 1970s and ’80s, he grew his scam to epic proportions, amassing hundreds of millions of pounds from thousands of marks all over the world. He baffled Henry Kissinger, scandalised Shirley Temple-Black, and had Nixon’s former attorney-general at his beck and call. Many tried to stop him, but Blay-Miezah continued to live in luxury, protected by ex-SAS soldiers while he deceived lawyers, businessmen and investigators around the globe.

In Anansi’s Gold, Yepoka Yeebo chases the ever-wilder trail of Blay-Miezah – and unfolds a riveting account of Cold War entanglements and African dreams – revealing the untold story of the grifter who beat the West at its own thieving game.

©2023 Yepoka Yeebo (P)2023 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic reviews

The remarkable story of John Ackah Blay-Miezah, a charismatic Ghanaian huckster who for two decades masterminded what she plausibly calls “one of the greatest con artists of all time” . . . The book is crisp and well-told, brimming with vivid scenes and colourful writing (Aanu Adeoye)

This compelling story of a charismatic conman who fooled thousands . . . This is a glorious tale of greed, exploited by an astonishingly brazen fraudster (Ian Birrell)

This astonishing book reveals not just Ghana’s history as you’ve never read it before, but some of the most important global events of the twentieth century. An impressive feat (Afua Hirsch)

This captivating story of a gifted con artist and his international network of abettors is not only a sheer pleasure to read, but also a profound inquiry into how a lie can become a legend. Yepoka Yeebo's tenacious reporting and relentless pursuit of the truth are nothing short of heroic (Kirk Wallace Johnson)

Yeebo tells an incredible story!

Yepoka Yeebo tells an incredible true story that reminds you fact is always stranger than fiction and often a lot funnier when it’s not being bloodily true. An incredible narrative of personal frailty, greed, corruption, geopolitics and some of the darkest humour ever. And also a cautionary tale of how Cold War smears against a post independence African leader were spun by conmen into global fortune and ruin. But most of all it is the story of the greatest conman of the 20th century