Ghosts not laid to rest haunt relentlessly, determined as they are to see the future in the rearview mirror. In this book, the ghosts of an Anglo-European colonial past and its hierarchy of humanity predicated on race remain the predicament of the first African country to gain independence from Britain. What does independence amount to when postcolonial Ghana continues with the same entanglements and shackles of defining and relating to itself as inferior to those who colonised it? Pierre provides an attentively wrought critique of the politics that surround race in Ghana. Hers is a meticulously crafted comprehensive account that reverberates throughout Africa. The book adds value by drawing attention to the West African experience and perspective, focusing on the construction of race as critical towards rethinking the question of race in Africa and globally (pp. xiv, 19).

Bringing a range of fields with an African focus, from anthropology and history to diaspora, African, and postcolonial studies, into a theoretical dialogue, Pierre historically locates ‘nativisation’ and ‘racialization’ in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa as the result of the unequal encounter with Europe. She traces the genesis of racial categories and dichotomies to the hegemonic encounters between Europe and Africa in the transatlantic slave trade and during colonialism. For Pierre, Ghana's political independence ‘signaled a shift in the colonial racial project’ (p. 38), a shift that emphasised racial consciousness and shunned institutionalised racialism. Yet surprisingly, the very structures that enabled the institutionalisation of racial hierarchy and attendant superiority of Whiteness in its diverse manifestations and hierarchies have been maintained in independent Ghana, a paradox that mirrors many countries across Africa. Far from yielding authentic independence through ‘full decolonisation’ and ‘deracialisation’, Ghana's liberation fell short of the radical breaks that some had hoped for, settling unquestioningly for the inferiority complexes that colonialism had produced and of which it had made a currency among Ghanaians.

An Anglo-European index of beauty interconnects local Ghanaian hierarchies of social visibility with global hierarchies championed by the beauty industry that crowns whiteness and its equivalents in other races (light skin, natural, or bleached, etc.) as the ultimate indicator of beauty. It is thus hardly surprising that chemical skin bleaching by many Black Ghanaians, particularly women, is rampant. Pierre's book is overwhelmingly enmeshed with the politics of the body. In marrying anecdotal, ethnographic, and historical data, she examines the imposition of the colonizer as well as the physical replacement of the colonial government with African bodies (p. 40). One of Pierre's informants, Emma, had a face that ‘was lightly covered with a white cream that made it look like it was painted’ (p. 101). Emma wanted to be lighter skinned because she believed ‘light means beauty’ (p. 103). For Pierre, the practice of ‘skin bleaching and the rejection of Blackness’ (p. 104) and attempts to achieve ‘Whiteness’, the presence of heritage tourism, and ‘exclusively White spaces’ in a ‘predominantly Black African city’ (p. 71) are a clear testimony that skin colour and race still matter in postcolonial Africa, and even in nonresidential former colonies like Ghana. To Pierre, it is a consolidation and ‘local articulation of a historical global political economy of race and White supremacy … in postcolonial Africa’ (pp. 71, 73). Granted this pathologization of blackness and its associated identity and meaning, Pierre is able to relay not only the sway of hegemonic conceptions of race but also the different configurations in which race is expressed, challenged, and consciously altered by postcolonial Ghanaians.

While Pierre's title might suggest an adherence to impressions of what it means to be black, she also examines ideas around interracial interactions and the implications of whiteness amongst Ghanaians. The subtle complexities reveal themselves all the more when Pierre extends on the associations between whiteness and wealth and then provides meaningful ethnographic examples of how being from a ‘white’ country valorises social hierarchies between Ghanaians and diasporic African Americans. She writes that these processes are underscored by the neoliberal policies that Ghana adopted, consistent African American curiosity about African countries, and, significantly, the academy's interest in African American fascination with returning to their ancestral homes (p. 183). A simplistic and straightforward analysis of race in Ghana is, therefore, impossible, which Pierre validates by establishing the need to examine varying perspectives.

The Predicament of Blackness is a testament to the intricacies that exist within any conceptualisation of race, with Ghana providing a site of departure for explaining the deeply nuanced politics of postcolonial African states. It also begs the question of what ‘blackness’ actually is – with the most nuanced answer beginning with the notion of a social construction for economic, political, and social gain by a colonial regime that systematically sought to mark the colonial individual by dividing and conquering. This, as Pierre demonstrates, was the precondition for the increasingly complex notion of race to flourish. Her monograph is a triumph for examining one of the most topical themes in this historical moment.