But I knew what he meant.

“Luckily” because his daughter was less likely to be told that she was too dark-skinned to be beautiful. “Luckily” because his daughter wouldn’t see billboards in Accra and wonder why no one up there looked like her. Mr. Nkrumah’s “luckily” was an acknowledgment of a fact of life without the filter of the politically correct.

That fact had been made clear to Eugenia and me as we reported this situation.

Along with photographer Jane Hahn, we called ourselves the “bleach squad” as our interviewees kept turning the table on us and making our own skin tones part of the story. Jane, an American of Korean descent, lives full time in Senegal, so she is far more tanned than Korean women in Seoul, many of whom use bleach themselves. But in West Africa, Jane is viewed as white.

For my part, I am a native of Liberia, but a descendant of the freed American slaves who colonized the country in 1822 and who had mated at one point or another with American whites, so I’m more of a coffee with milk, considered light-skinned by West African standards. Eugenia, from Larteh in Ghana’s eastern region, has a deep chocolate bark complexion. She is a head-turner.

And yet the three of us were told repeatedly that Jane and I had the preferred skin tones. “We wear it to look nice like you,” Beatrice Lampty, a market woman in the Jamestown neighborhood, had told me and Jane hours before.

“When I had a fair lady here as my secretary, people were trooping into my office all the time,” said Dr. Edmund Nminyem Delle, a dermatologist who for three decades has campaigned against skin bleaching, in acknowledging that women are pressured to bleach. “She was a half-caste lady. I wanted to marry her.” He ended up marrying a different light-skinned woman, and says that his sons, one dark and one light, both prefer light-skinned women.

“Please excuse what I’m about to say,” Mr. Nkrumah, the authority official, had apologized to Eugenia during our interview, before gesturing toward me and Jane. “But if you find 10 men, you will find only two who will say you are more attractive than these two ladies.”