Publisher's Synopsis
John Speke comes to Uganda to study education at Makerere University as part of a British aid program to provide post-colonial East Africa with the teachers it so desperately needs.
There he meets Mutima, a young member of the Baganda tribe, related to their royal family, and her brother Jonah, a political activist standing against the oppressive regimes of Milton Obote and later Idi Amin.
As John and Mutima's relationship grows, the young Englishman finds himself inadvertently drawn ever deeper into Jonah's campaign of civil unrest, culminating in a failed attempt to overthrow Amin himself.
Imprisoned in Uganda's notorious Makindye Prison, John is beaten, humiliated, and finally broken. To his shame, he gives his brutal captors Jonah's whereabouts.
An unknown benefactor arranges John's release, but his prison experiences leave deep emotional scars. Filled with guilt and self-loathing, John declares his contempt for Africa and all its people-including Jonah, Mutima, and John's own unborn child.
But once safely back in the United Kingdom, John's guilt festers. Faced with the specter of his own mortality, following a near fatal heart attack, he returns to Uganda, hoping to reconcile with the woman he loved and the child he's never met-a young girl called Malaika.
