Reviews

Anansi's Gold is about a scam artist who garnered inexplicable loyalty from people despite blatantly bilking them out of their money, who boasted of his University of Pennsylvania education while cheating repeatedly and unrepentantly on his wives, who moves in circles with Roy Cohn while living up to the '80s "Greed is Good" mantra and forever wriggling free of the consequences of his actions— oh, no, not Donald Trump!

This is about John Ackah Blay-Miezah, a Ghanaian con artist who fooled various kinds of greedy and gullible people out of millions in the 70s and 80s. To some Blay-Miezah promised a Pan-Africanist vision of post-colonial investment in Ghana, with the returns from the "investment fund" under his management used to build roads, schools, and health clinics; to others, he confirmed all their racist stereotypes about Africa and let them think of themselves as the ones suckering him. Shockingly, the only person who came out ahead was Blay-Miezah.

The marketing has kind of positioned this as a true crime story, but it's actually much more a sober historical account of post-independence Ghana, and how its people suffered from the consequences of colonialism and the brutality of first a military dictatorship and then the Rawlings regime. Yepoka Yeebo does a great job in pulling together so many disparate strands of a fraud scheme that ranged across continents, but I did think it could have been edited down about 50 pages or so without losing anything of the essential argument.