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.
The man born John Kolorah Blay in 1941 grew up in poverty, but he worked hard as a boy to pay for the fees for a decent school; he spent his evenings hawking kerosene in glass bottles, earning him the nickname “Kerosene Boy”. He carefully aped the manners of his well-to-do classmates, and secured a scholarship to study at the University of Pennsylvania – but never enrolled, preferring to work as a busboy at an exclusive country club. As Yeebo puts it, “he studied what money and power looked like”.
Before he invented the Oman Ghana Trust, Blay-Miezah spent years posing plausibly as a banker or diplomat in service of petty scams. He once dodged jail by faking a heart attack, asking the arresting officers to take him to a bank so he could withdraw money for his medical bills, and escaped by climbing through the hole beneath a latrine.
The real villain of Yeebo’s book is not, in fact, Blay-Miezah, but the British Empire and its “dimwitted” administrators. (Yeebo sometimes abandons her usual tone of cool irony when discussing this subject.) This class mismanaged Ghana’s finances so badly before the country was granted independence in 1957 that tens of millions of pounds were lost in bad investments. The fact that Ghana was such a poor country despite being so rich in natural resources was what enabled many people to believe Blay-Miezah’s claims that Nkrumah had squirrelled away a fortune.
The scam was eventually exposed, however, and Blay-Miezah died of apparently natural causes in 1992, while under house arrest. (Only rarely outside of fiction do con artists commit suicide when unmasked.) 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.
Anansi’s Gold by Yepoka Yeebo is published by Bloomsbury at £20. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Books
