This Really Happened In Africa

Part two picks up on the morning of the twenty two million dollar coronation. Broken air conditioning, four thousand guests, an emperor an hour late. Bokassa takes the crown off its cushion and puts it on his own head, the way Napoleon did. That night at dinner he leans over to the French minister beside him and says the sentence that follows him for the rest of his life. We cover the coronation,...

In 1977 a man crowned himself Emperor of Central Africa. And France paid for it. In this episode, we break down the story behind it. Jean-Bédel Bokassa was six years old when a French concession company beat his father to death in a town square. One week later his mother took her own life. The same country that did this then educated him, named him, and gave him twenty-two years in its army. Part...

In January 1941, the Earl of Erroll was found shot dead in his car outside Nairobi. He was the most infamous womanizer of Kenya's Happy Valley set, a circle of British aristocrats who traded England's rules for a highland paradise of adultery, cocaine, morphine, and endless parties, built on land taken from the people who lived there. When Erroll fell for Diana, the young wife of the newly arrived...

Out of prison and out of options, Blay-Miezah invents the Oman Ghana Trust Fund, a fake multi billion dollar fortune tied to Kwame Nkrumah. Investors hand over their savings, presidents take him seriously, and somehow he keeps walking free. We cover the forged documents, the bounced checks, his run for president, his years hiding in London, and the 60 Minutes investigation that finally exposed him...

In 1975, a man walked out of a Ghanaian prison with nothing but a story, and that story would go on to swindle millions across three continents. Meet John Ackah Blay-Miezah: the "Kerosene Boy" from a small village in western Ghana who charmed his way into the company of presidents, diplomats, and billionaires. This week on This Really Happened In Africa , we trace how one man's obsession with a st...

Welcome to This Really Happened In Africa! Our first over is a Ghanian man who managed to con the whole world.