An American visitor and uninvited guest in the village of Nok, Marie Hasluck is an irrepressible anthropologist who believes that she has found the Kingdom of Heaven in the forests of Nigeria. There, to her eyes, the Birri tribesmen make love and war unfettered by the constraints and complications of Western civilisation; a state which Marie finds enviable and which she does her best to emulate. However, all is not well even in this pagan paradise: white prospectors are staking claims within Birri territory and the eccentric District Officer, Bewser, can no longer keep them at bay, for all his promises to the villagers. As the Birri warriors become increasingly enraged by the colonialists' betrayal and as her own involvement with Bewser deepens, Marie finds that her position as a charmed but distanced onlooker is inevitably compromised.