Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah – who’d led Ghana’s fight for independence from Great Britain – was deposed in a 1966 coup that was likely backed by the Cold War-era CIA. In the aftermath, stories swirled that Nkrumah had smuggled untold wealth out of the country.
Later on after Nkrumah’s death, a man named John Ackah Blay-Miezah started telling people that Nkrumah had been protecting his nation’s riches in a vault in Switzerland, stashing it there until it was safe to bring the money back home. Blay-Miezah said the former president had placed him in charge of the fund, called the Oman Ghana Trust Fund.
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It’s a great story, but none of it was true. Blay-Miezah was a liar and a con man who spent decades distorting the history of his country to bilk investors who thought they’d get a piece of that treasure.
His story is recounted in “Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington and Swindled the World,” by Yepoka Yeebo. The author, who was raised in London by Ghanian parents, details Blay-Miezah’s exploits across the decades (with cameos by everyone from child star turned ambassador Shirley Temple Black to disgraced attorney general John Mitchell) but has greater ambitions.
In a recent video interview, Yeebo discussed using this story to set the record straight on much of Ghana’s distorted and manipulated history — from Nkrumah to a more recent president, Jerry Rawlings, who Yeebo says targeted other Ghanaians including her own father — and on the damage wreaked by interference from Great Britain and the United States.
Q. How much was this about telling John Ackah Blay-Miezah’s and how much was it about getting the truth out about Ghana’s history and the West’s responsibility for the problems there?
I grew up in London and had not heard of Blay-Miezah until my mom sent me the “60 Minutes” clip, where it was obvious to me that his story was patently ridiculous. But my mother said, “No, this is possible.”
It was shocking that he was able to con so many people, including famous and well-respected people, and that even now many people still believe he was telling some form of the truth, thinking, “Maybe he was a con man who didn’t do the right thing, but the fund exists.”
When I started out, I thought this was just a really good yarn, very entertaining and messy. I love a messy detail. But early in the research, I realized the con wouldn’t make sense without context and then the context fed into what Blay-Miezah did: He’d use breaking news moments like political unrest to delay payments. And then I’d see what he did creep into the news and change people’s interpretations of what was happening at the time. Then I realized you couldn’t write about how he was able to get away with such audacious things without telling this whole story.
But it was also important to tell the history. Nkrumah has long seemed outlandishly corrupt – and he wasn’t. But that didn’t stop people; it was just accepted without evidence. Rawlings actively tried to murder my father, who was a minor politician at the time. My parents had friends who were disappeared and when I started asking about this period it was pretty clear they had post-traumatic stress and that really broke my heart.
Rawlings could see which way the wind was blowing and adjust. He was brilliant at laundering his image, breaking with his reputation as a murderous dictator by having a state funeral for Nkrumah and holding state visits with President Clinton. But he was actively grafting on a massive scale all along. Younger people who didn’t know the past loved him because he was incredibly charismatic and ushered in a period of relative prosperity. When his death was announced, even my cousins posted loving tributes to him.
Q. How difficult was it to dig up the truth of Ghana’s modern history?
The idea that a con man could manipulate history so much surprised me, but it was with help from the U.K. and the U.S. – his stories kept being retold and had such legs. It really breaks my heart that so much of Ghanian history has been obscured or lost and so outlandishly manipulated. The worst of it was in foreign newspapers like the New York Times articles from the 1960s. I was always offended by how lazy they were.
There’s so much history that was lost; and when older people I was trying to get to talk died, it felt like it was slipping through my fingers.
When I went looking for sources, they didn’t exist. At the British Library, there was an old magazine where someone had ripped out the two pages I was looking for. The basic information I expected to get from books wasn’t there.
There’s a weird vacuum and people exploited that and filled the vacuum. A lot of sources I found are not easily accessible, including people’s personal archives – one source I had to keep calling at dawn so I could look in his filing system. One archivist friend was walking past the high court and there were files open to the elements, people’s lives rotting in the humidity. Another archivist friend found more files in the basement of a building.
It’s important to preserve this history before it’s too late and establish research trails so others can replicate that work and build on it. Hopefully, many more people will find stories and go through family archives and write all their stories into history, adding real information on top of a pile of incredibly suspect history to balance the picture and fill it out.
Q. You write about lies changing history and about Blay-Miezah trying to run out the clock on his trials while he ran for president, hoping a victory would solve his legal problems. That sounds kind of familiar.
I originally thought the problems were specific to Ghana but they weren’t. We all discovered over the past couple of years how much corruption there is everywhere and how people make their fortunes and get to continue to graft after indictments and being out of office and seemingly being disgraced.
If I’d written this book ten years ago people in the U.K. and the U.S. would have said, “That doesn’t happen here.” But Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, who is also a huckster extraordinaire, got elected and the book started to mean something different.
