Rick Morgan, an American engineer who runs a mine in East Africa, is approached one day by his friend Jim Scott, who needs someplace to store canisters of toxic waste. Unfortunately, a spill occurs a short time later, resulting in deaths and Morgan having to leave the country. A year later, he is approached by a government agent looking for a missing supply of potentially hazardous poison, which in truth hides something even more valuable.

Beginning in South Africa under the apartheid regime, the film follows a young girl who flees the country after a violent confrontation with a local white landowner in which her father is killed. She settles in Abidjan, where, ten years later, she has become a university student. As part of her studies, she visits the Taureg tribe on the edge of the Sahara before at last returning to post-Apartheid South Africa.