After many years as a tourist guide in the Slave museum in Senegal, Alloune, 65, a widower living alone, decides to go to America in search of his ancestors, taken as y from the village 200 years ago and sold as slaves in the New World. From Charleston to Little Senegal, New York, Alloune searches for his ancestors but also for an ideal vision of an African family, only to discover a strong ostracism between African and Afro-American communities. He is embodied by his nephew Hassan, a cab driver and his girlfriend Biram, an African with modern views of love and mariage; and Ida an older woman, faced with seeing her pregnant granddaughter destroyed by drugs and life on the street.