Curious to find out what had become of the Gikuyu boys whom he had taught at a rural secondary school on the cusp of independence, David Sandgren returned to Giakanja Secondary School in 1995 to interview ninety graduates from three classes. He was able to track down 75 of them. Except for two or three cases, these were one-time interviews, rather than full life histories. The author suggests that they were open-ended, ‘a self-voiced life story’ (p. 12). Nevertheless, the book reveals that the interviews were focused on areas of education and subsequent career development that demonstrated the ‘elite’ status of his former students. Their experiences contradict the notion that ‘the peace and prosperity anticipated after independence’ in Kenya were largely unmet (p. xvii).

Sandgren uses colonial archival data and secondary sources in the opening section, ‘Late colonial childhoods’, to explain what happened to the boys generally during the Mau Mau rebellion and the Emergency. A few lines from his former students’ narratives are cited: one recalled what it was like to be forced to relocate from his home in the Rift Valley back to the crowded Kikuyu Reserve; another recalled that his father was detained; and three recounted how their fathers were killed during the Emergency. The reader gets a fuller sense of what was happening to schools (some were destroyed, others burned down) in Nyeri and at Giakanja at the time, making it impossible for students to go to school.

The next two chapters draw on the author's recollections of Giakanja Secondary School at the time he became a teacher there at the age of 21. The school was only half-completed in 1963 and lacked classrooms and facilities (a laboratory for sciences). The first year it had only one class and was a day school. The informants recalled that, as boys, they had disliked the school. Two left when they found that it was not a boarding school; they would have to find their own lodging, cook their own food, and supply labor to help build the school. By the second year, with the help of a US government grant, the classrooms and laboratory were completed. The second-year boys had survived that first difficult year, bonding in the process. Instead of hazing the new first-year students, the older boys became their mentors. Sandgren illustrates how overcoming this initial educational obstacle toughened these students, teaching them the value of persistence. It also built their resourcefulness and contributed to their achievement later in life.

A chapter on the Cambridge Exams (CE) offers an autobiographical account of a young American teacher trying to adjust to rote learning and Kenya's exam-driven education, especially in preparation for the CE in November of his students’ fourth year. The highpoint of this chapter is ‘Waiting for the results’. At the time, CE exam results for students, nationwide, were published in newspapers the following January. The author makes use of frightening excerpts from the men's recollections of this waiting period to find out whether they had passed or failed. Their results often determined the rest of the lives, particularly if they wanted to continue their education. Those who did well went on to university, while others found work.

The chapter ‘Entering an economic elite’ suffers a bit due to Sandgren's failure to define ‘elite’. It appears that he includes education (Giakanja became an excellent school), motivation, and aspirations as contributing factors to the emergence of the Kenyan elite. Timing was a major determinant; many of his students sought employment during a period when many expatriates were leaving government positions and Africans were filling their posts. Job seekers also benefited from a new, expanding economy in the postcolonial 1960s and early 1970s. Their children, beginning in the 1980s, found that even with university degrees, ‘good jobs’ were hard to get. Most of his informants found positions in the government sector, but a number escaped to the private sector, where they could earn more and, in some cases, be self-employed. That they succeeded confirmed Sandgren's supposition that his former school in Kenya was, indeed, producing exceptional graduates who had joined the elite class in the newly independent nation.