Kenya wins independence, and Tom Mboya asks what comes next

Tom Mboya helped lead Kenya’s movement for independence: a labour organiser who became a Pan-African statesman, concerned with the whole continent as well as his own country. He wrote Freedom and After as independence arrived, and the title gives the order of his thinking: first liberation, then the problems a new nation would have to solve.

The book mixes his political argument with his own story and looks across Africa at the newly independent nations, asking what they might become. Photographs show his family, his travels and Kenyan political life, and a political map of Africa fills the endpapers. Mboya was assassinated in 1969, six years after the book appeared, so it is also a record of what one of the movement’s leaders hoped for before his life was cut short.

This is the American edition, published by Little, Brown in Boston and stated on the copyright page to be the first edition. It is in grey-black cloth with the gold lettering on the spine faded and slightly rubbed; there is no jacket, and the pages and the endpaper map are intact in the photographs.