An Evening with Yepoka Yeebo & Bradford Pearson

The New York Times Book Review – 100 Notable Books of 2023 Pick
One of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s “10 New Books to Read in August”

ANANSI’S GOLD is the astounding, never-before-told story of how an audacious Ghanaian con artist pulled off one of the 20th century’s longest-running and most spectacular frauds. After winning independence in 1957, Ghana instantly became a target for home-grown opportunists and rapacious Western interests determined to snatch any assets that British colonialism hadn’t already stripped. A CIA-funded military junta ousted the inspiring president, Kwame Nkrumah, then falsely accused him of hiding the country’s gold overseas.

Into this big lie stepped one of history’s most charismatic scammers, a con man to rival the trickster god Anansi. Born into poverty in Ghana and trained in the United States, John Ackah Blay-Miezah declared himself custodian of an alleged Nkrumah trust fund worth billions. You, too, could claim a piece–if only you would “invest” in Blay-Miezah’s fictitious efforts to release the equally fictitious fund. Over the 1970s and ’80s, he and his accomplices-including Ghanaian state officials and Nixon’s former attorney general–scammed hundreds of millions of dollars out of thousands of believers around the world. American prosecutors called his scam “one of the most fascinating–and lucrative–in modern history.”

In Anansi’s Gold, Yepoka Yeebo chases Blay-Miezah’s wild trail and discovers, at long last, what really happened to Ghana’s missing wealth. She unfolds a riveting account of Cold War entanglements, international finance, and postcolonial betrayal, revealing how what we call “history” writes itself into being, one lie at a time.

 Yepoka Yeebo’s work has appeared in the Guardian, Huffington Post, the Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek and Quartz, among other publications. A graduate of Queen Mary, University of London and of Columbia University’s School of Journalism, she divides her time between Accra, London and New York. Anansi’s Gold is her first book.

Bradford Pearson is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist and author whose work examines everything from magicians to Japanese American incarceration to his own kidnapping. He’s written for The New York Times, and Esquire, Time, and Men’s Health magazines, among many other publications. He is currently the editor of Philadelphia magazine and a contributing writer for the New York Times’ Special Projects team. His 2021 book The Eagles of Heart Mountain was the basis for the NFL documentary 9066: Fear, Football, and the Theft of Freedom.

He is a recipient of the German Marshall Fund of the United States’ Marshall Memorial Fellowship, which took him to Europe to study media on the continent. He grew up in Hyde Park, New York, and now lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two children.

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