The book's jacket cover featured an image of Kenyatta in traditional dress, wearing a skin cloak over one shoulder and carrying a spear. The book was published under the name "Jomo Kenyatta", the first time that he had done so; the term "Jomo" was close to a Kikuyu word describing the removal of a sword from its scabbard. "Facing Mount Kenya" was a commercial failure, selling only 517 copies, but was generally well received; an exception was among white Kenyans, whose assumptions about the Kikuyu being primitive savages in need of European civilization it challenged. Murray-Brown later described it as "a propaganda "tour de force". No other African had made such an uncompromising stand for tribal integrity." Bodil Folke Frederiksen, a scholar of development studies, referred to it as "probably the most well-known and influential African scholarly work of its time", while for fellow scholar Simon Gikandi, it was "one of the major texts in what has come to be known as the invention of tradition in colonial Africa".