Waiyaki grows up in the traditional village community of the Gikuyu tribe and is initiated by his father as a spiritual leader and renewer of his people. He attends a Christian mission school, but when he falls in love with a girl from the Christianized neighboring village, a tragic, inescapable conflict arises with the tribe. Waiyaki, who refuses to convert and, on the other hand, imparts the knowledge of the whites in an independent Gikuyu school, finds himself caught in between: a victim of the torn identity that continues to characterize modern Africa. Ngugi wa Thiong'o tells poetically and sensitively about life in the Kenyan highlands at a time when white conquest was still a threatening shadow.