Anansi’s Gold by Yepoka Yeebo — the greatest scam of all time?
An illuminating story about greed and post-independence Ghana comes to some troubling conclusions
Tales of scammers continue to fascinate and delight. Despite a consensus that conmen — and despite some high-profile recent cases, they are often men — commit acts that most people find repulsive, we can’t seem to look away, as an ever-expanding list of books, podcasts and TV series demonstrates.
On to that well-worn path steps Yepoka Yeebo, a British-Ghanaian journalist, with her debut Anansi’s Gold, which tells 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”.
Blay-Miezah — here referred to with a wink and a nudge as “Our Man” — had multiple aliases: he claimed to be, at various times, diplomat, doctor, banker, Harvard professor and a UN consultant. He was also especially fond of high-end hotels. (Needless to say, he never intended to pay.) In fact his real name was John Kolorah Blay, and he’d grown up poor in the coastal village of Alengenzure.
It was during a spell in prison in the US in 1972 — the result of failing to pay the bill at a Philadelphia hotel while impersonating an emissary of the Ghanaian government — that Blay-Miezah concocted his biggest trick, the one that would make him infamous and forms the focus of the book. It was named The Oman Ghana Trust Fund.
In Our Man’s telling, the fund had been set up by Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first post-independence prime minister and president, who had purportedly creamed off large amounts of his country’s wealth — some $27bn in cash and diamonds and 30,000 gold bars, all hidden in Swiss banks. To access these funds, Blay-Miezah simply needed money in advance. Anyone who invested would get a 10-fold return.
The whole thing was, of course, a fiction; despite allegations of corruption, Nkrumah was in fact a hero of the independence movement who strove for his country to have a more balanced relationship with world powers. But it was a spectacularly successful deception nonetheless; over more than a decade, from 1973 to 1986, Blay-Miezah and his American partner, Robert Ellis, made away with millions of dollars, defrauding hundreds of people in the process. Blay-Miezah continued the scam for a few more years after Ellis left the enterprise.
Even John Mitchell — Nixon’s disgraced attorney-general — got himself involved, having been promised astronomical returns. His mere connection to the scheme helped Blay-Miezah burnish his reputation as a well-connected international businessman.
Why did people fall for the act? The reasons were numerous and not altogether surprising: greed, personal ambition, hubris. Others believed Blay-Miezah was a fraud, but were convinced the money existed somehow. He also sold people stories that suited their political objectives.
This was particularly true of an African-American priest called James Edward Woodruff, who ministered at the prison in Philadelphia. A passionate believer in economic freedom for African states, Woodruff was convinced by Blay-Miezah that the fund would be used to transform not only Ghana but entire countries. “It was as if all of Woodruff’s dreams had come true,” Yeebo writes. Woodruff ended up introducing him to Ellis, who arranged for the hotel bill to be paid and Blay-Miezah to be freed — with disastrous results.
The irony is striking. As Yeebo writes: “To black people, [Blay-Miezah and Ellis] were selling liberation: a chance to repair the wounds of colonialism. To everyone else, they were selling the chance to loot an African country’s ancestral wealth — which is to say, they were selling colonialism.”
Yeebo writes extensively about the mismanagement of Ghana both before and after independence in 1957; in the decade before independence, she claims, Britain extracted £150mn from the country — perhaps £3bn in today’s money — and invested just £1.5mn. Far from siphoning off the country’s resources, Nkrumah in fact succeeded in bringing home gold reserves being held in London.
She is also clear-eyed about the harm perpetrated after independence by a succession of military rulers — particularly Jerry Rawlings, president from 1981 to 2001, who allegedly enriched himself and his cronies at the country’s expense while espousing faux-revolutionary ideology. The book is crisp and well-told, brimming with vivid scenes and colourful writing.
Despite the trail of debt and destruction he left in his wake, Blay-Miezah never faced any real consequences. As the walls were closing in, he dropped dead of natural causes in 1992 while under house arrest — one last great escape. Meanwhile his accomplice, Ellis, went to jail.
Yet his story echoes into the present, where many Europeans or Americans still seem all too willing to believe that in partnership with a palm greased here or there, they too, could make off with a favourable oil deal or an inflated construction project.
It could even be argued that Blay-Miezah’s scheme has similarities to the advanced-fee frauds of the 1980s, which laid the groundwork for the omnipresent “Nigerian prince” email phishing scams of today — with gullible foreigners persuaded that dizzying amounts of African money could be theirs if only they send a small advance.
And the intrigue continues: in 2009, a group named the Friends of Oman Ghana Trust Fund successfully petitioned Ghana’s government to investigate the scheme, apparently believing it was entirely plausible that the country, so rich in natural resources, had some money stowed somewhere for a rainy day. A commission found no evidence that the fund ever existed. But its legend lives on.
Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Swindled the World by Yepoka Yeebo Bloomsbury £20/$29.99, 400 pages