Falling hopelessly and inappropriately in love with the first white girl he lays eyes on, Andy Africa, an unusually smart fifteen-year-old in Kontagora, Nigeria, is forced to reckon with his identity and desires and determine how to live on the so-called Cursed Continent.
Andrew Aziza is a fifteen-year-old boy living in Kontagora in Northern Nigeria. He lives with his secretive mother, Gloria, and spends his days about town with his droogs, Slim and Morocca. He's contemplating the larger questions with his teacher Zahrah and his equally brilliant friend Fatima, a Hausa-Fulani girl who clearly has feelings for him. Together they discuss mathematical theorems, Black power, and what Andy has deemed the curse of Africa. Inevitably, Andy falls hopelessly in love with the first white girl he lays eyes on: Eileen, Father McMahon's niece. But at the church party held to celebrate her arrival, multiple crises loom. The first is that an unfamiliar man there claims to be Andy's father. The second is that an anti-Christian mob has gathered, headed for the church. In the ensuing havoc and its aftermath, Andy is forced to reckon with his identity and desires and determine how to live on the so-called Cursed Continent.