Eslanda Goode Robeson. 
 
The John Day Company: 1945. First edition. Hardcover in a jacket. Octavo. Major tears to the jacket, and the back panel and back flap are separated. A few scuffs to the boards of the book, including a culaccino mark. Corners of the boards and the heel and the crown of the spine are bumped. Spine slightly leaning. Slight tanning to the endpapers. 154 pages. Book is very good, jacket is good.  
 
She guided her husband Paul Robeson into a career as a legendary actor, trained as a chemist, and had begun raising a family. Then she started studying anthropology in London and embarked on a rare enterprise for the day: describing South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, and Congo as an American Black woman. Robeson meets kings and colonizers, pigmies and shepherds. Her scientist's eye and confidence in her stranger's instincts keeps her sight on precious details (she took the pictures and at times employs the perspective of her son) without losing the larger political implications of what she encounters. John Day Company was run by Pearl S. Buck's husband, and it was Robeson's friendship with Buck that led to this book being published. An uncommon object for an uncommon project. 
 
"Our first glimpse of inland South Africa: lonely hills and lone valleys with cattle grazing in the spacious pastureland; table mountains one to two thousand feet above sea level; isolated farms surrounded by their miles and miles of land. And on the roads, Africans walking, Africans struggling with oxcarts (the usual means of transport in the immense areas where there are no railroads; an occasional car near the towns and villages; and dust."