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 away from his village two hundred years ago and sold as slaves in the New World. From Charleston to Little Senegal, in New York, he searches for his ancestors but also for an ideal vision of an African family, only to discover a strong ostracism between the African and African American communities, embodied by his nephew Hassan, a cab driver and his girlfriend Biram, an African with modern views on love and marriage; and Ida, an older woman, faced with seeing her pregnant granddaughter destroyed by hard life on the street.