In 1895, Emma Elizabeth Stanford, the daughter of a noted Anglican reverend, is twenty-nine years of age. She has grown up in India, where her mother died helping the starving and the sick, leaving her with deep Christian beliefs. She marries Richard, an employee in London's Colonial Office, who accepts the position of economic representative in the Nigerian colony, and they travel to West Africa together. Here, Emma soon confronts the violence of imperialist domination, which her husband wholeheartedly supports. On the banks of the Cross River, the local population faces disease, war, and the denial of freedom, revealing the fragility of the human condition. Tension between the colonizers and the colonized grows when King Gazi Fulani, a native ruler educated in England, organizes a rebellious opposition to the ever-increasing taxation; Richard responds by deploying troops against the people. The riots quickly escalate into increasingly serious violence.