yepoka yeebo
aNANSI’S GOLD: THE MAN WHO SWINDLED THE WORLD (2023)
Winner of the Plutarch Award.
A book of the year at the New York Times, New Yorker, and Washington Post.
CLICK HERE FOR THE BOOK AT AMAZON
This is the bizarre story of John Ackah Blay-Miezah who was born into poverty in Ghana in 1941. He became in the 1970s and 1980s one of the greatest swindlers of all time. He claimed, via emails sent worldwide, to be the custodian of a multi-billion dollar trust fund set up by the deposed Presdident of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah. He persuaded his fraud victims to send him money as a way of receiving large sums from the trust fund. But of course no money was forthcoming, and he amassed hundreds of millions. He lived in luxury, protected by ex-SAS bodyguards, while deceiving investigators from around the world.
The Times Literary Supplement described the book thus: ‘As Yepoka Yeebo makes clear in her richly entertaining account of [Blay-Miesah's] rise and fall, he combined charisma and a silver tongue, attracting both the greedy and the idealistic . . . She has a sharp eye for droll detail and is especially successful in evoking the two decades that followed independence - a glitzy but sleazy world of nightclubs and casinos "where the champagne flowed, even when the electricity did not.”’
MEET THE AUTHOR
CLICK HERE FOR A VIDEO OF THE AUTHOR (46 MINUTES)
Yepoka Yeebo is an investigative journalist who divides her time between Accra in Ghana, London and New York. She graduated from Queen Mary, University of London and the School of Journalism at Columbia University, New York.
