Yepoka Yeebo’s riveting Anansi’s Gold traces the outlines of Blay-Miezah’s life, shedding light on how he perpetrated his deceptions for years while living in incredible opulence. The author, a freelance journalist, delves into archives across the Atlantic, digs up criminal proceedings and conducts interviews with victims and associates alike, in the process telling us not just about Blay-Miezah, but about the world that enabled him to thrive ... This character study also functions as a key historical text on post-Nkrumah Ghana. We gain behind-the-scenes access to two coups and insight into the functioning of the state intelligence system that ruled before Ghana’s transition to democracy.
It’s a wild tale indeed, brought to life by Yeebo’s intricate research and compelling prose ... Writing about a con as convoluted and extensive as Blay-Miezah’s is no easy endeavor, but in Anansi’s Gold...Yeebo does a phenomenal job explaining how one lie took on a life of its own, one that still hasn’t ended.
Blay-Miezah was slick enough to capture the attention of savvy folk, rather than just the conventionally gullible. As Yepoka Yeebo, a British-Ghanaian journalist, makes clear in her richly entertaining account of his rise and fall, he combined charisma and a silver tongue, attracting both the greedy and the idealistic – the latter seduced by the thought of using the missing billions to boost Ghana’s infrastructure ... Spanning the period from Nkrumah’s student days in the 1930s to the scramble for Blay-Miezah’s assets after his death in 1992, Yeebo’s story is one of a country 'ripped apart by colonialism, then … set upon by vultures.' She has a sharp eye for droll detail and is especially successful in evoking the two decades that followed independence.
The sprawling story of Blay-Miezah’s outsize life and wayward career is told with mordant aplomb by first-time British-Ghanaian author Yepoka Yeebo ... While Anansi’s Gold reflects a daunting amount of research, it reads like a picaresque novel ... While Ms. Yeebo’s narrative is compelling, some of her postcolonial analysis is debatable.
Reading Anansi’s Gold is like watching a heist movie in agonizing slow motion. It’s all about improvisation, unforced error, unlikely escape. (Blay-Miezah once eluded police by dropping into a latrine-style toilet and shimmying through the small door used to empty it.) Yeebo compares his marks, aptly, to the members of a millenarian cult; every deferred payday, like every false apocalypse, strengthened their faith.
Biographers of con-artists are always at a disadvantage, in that it’s nigh-impossible to convey the unique charisma that enables somebody like Blay-Miezah to persuade people to hand over their life savings. But Yeebo does at least plausibly convey how her subject honed his skills ... He was, in his appalling way, an artist, and like all good biographies of artists, Yeebo’s book conveys the uniqueness of his personality while also showing how his art was forged in, and fed the requirements of, the times in which he lived.
Well-researched and engaging, [Anansi's Gold] draws readers into the intricate web of lies about a trust-fund tall tale that spanned throughout the 1970s and '80s and across the globe. Readers who enjoy true crime and stories about cons will quickly be absorbed into Yeebo's first book.”
Even as she catches readers up in what often reads like a breathless caper, the author takes care to ground them in what matters most: Ghana and its sadly 'fragile' history. Utterly absorbing.
Journalist Yeebo brilliantly illuminates the stranger-than-fiction career of Ghanaian fraudster John Ackah Blay-Miezah (1941–1992) in this thrilling true-crime account ... eebo’s details and research are beyond meticulous, and she spins her central con artist into a charismatic lead. This is perfect for fans of Frank Abignale Jr.’s Catch Me If You Can.
