The year is 1976, and the "Wind of Change" is sweeping across Africa, bringing independence to the southern state of Azania (fictional name), and thus ending British rule and decades of white dominance. The country's blacks begin to live side by side with whites. But whites continue to live well and impose their superiority over the country's black majority, leaving large pockets of white racism and black poverty.

When he is thirteen years old, Nigel Kenyatta is the first black student to be transferred to an all- white public school. On his first day of school he is beaten and spat upon. He is told that since blacks have small brains, and are therefore incapable of sitting in a class, that he should leave. He suffers relentless verbal and physical abuse on daily basis. Left to fend for himself, Nigel undergoes a metamorphosis, an abrupt challenge to his courage. When the most feared boy on campus challenges him to a fight, he not only defends himself, but also beats his challenger. However, instead of being hailed as a hero, Nigel is placed on suspension by the school headmaster, Mike Biggs, who is a hardcore racist.

One of the spectators, a sympathetic young white boy (Hubert Murray), writes a letter of protest, condemning Nigel's suspension, and sends it to the Parents Teachers Association, with a copy to the editor of the country's leading newspaper. When the letter is published, the Ministry of Education puts Biggs on suspension pending investigation. The search in the headmaster's office leads to the discovery of a Top Secret letter written by one of the leaders (Nathaniel Kraus) of the Red Cobra.

The RC is a Rhodesian clandestine army whose chief objective is to eliminate blacks in neighboring Azania through "super-sensitive" covert operations. Discovered in Mr. Biggs' house are more letters, documents, and minutes of meetings supported by a group of right-wing scientists and retired military men who are part of the global network of eugenicists, who operate in South Africa and all over Europe and North America. The trial of Mr. Biggs and his accomplices reveals an organization code-named "Project Suppression," which plans to use chemical and biological weapons to wipe out blacks in Azania.

The "small brain" racist remarks are extremely distressing to Nigel. With the support of Hubert, who becomes his best friend, Nigel sets out to prove the pseudoscientific theory wrong by employing intelligence as a weapon with which to fight racism. He graduates from high school with honors and enters the prestigious Azania Institute of Technology, while Hubert becomes a student at Oxford University in England. It is at the height of the Cold War, a period marked by massive military buildup and intensive competition and threats of nuclear attacks. This marks Nigel's precognitive dream in which a United Federal States of Africa-led by Nelson Mandela as president, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as Secretary of State, and Malcolm X as Secretary of Defense-manufacture the world's first anti-nuclear bomb. At the height of Chekstan (Pakistan) and Dewori's (India) nuclear confrontation, the world turns to the United Federal States of Africa to save it from total destruction.

In 1991 Nigel flies to the United States of America to pursue his dream and studies mechanical engineering (robotics) at the Boston University. Hubert becomes a scientist in the South African government, attached to the Nuclear Department of the Ministry of Defense in Cape Town. He comes in contact with members of Project Suppression, and works hard to frustrate their mad science by sending secret letters to Nigel, detailing some of their aspirations, such as plotting to kill Nelson Mandela by slipping thallium into his medication. Hubert is the mole.

When he reaches the United States, Nigel is shocked and disillusioned. He had dreamt of arriving in the "land of the free," where "all Men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." Instead, he comes face-to-face with racism on and off campus. He moves to Roxbury, a predominantly black suburb, and discovers a hidden subculture filled with drug addicts, traumatized families, and death. He feels devastated when he sees how drugs are pumped into the black suburbs as a calculated attempt to foster black self-destruction, a reminder of the work of eugenicists in his own country.

Instead of despairing over the plight of black Americans, Nigel pursues his dream. At Boston University, he creates a robot (SaharaD), which allows him to program a virtual robot, which can win virtual wars with other virtual robots. Through this robotics work, he wins the mind and heart of Joseph Bellamy, a retired Harvard University professor of robotics who helps him transfer to Harvard. At Harvard Nigel is greeted by the first on-campus murder-suicide, in which the perpetrator and victim are an African girl and her Korean roommate. This and other factors prompt him to start writing a book entitled Lamentations 0f An African Child,tracing the roots of racism.

During his research in Widener Library (Harvard University), he comes across medical literature which points to the fact that AIDS could have originated in the laboratory. But it is in the sixth chapter of his book that he rekindles hope for humankind. He writes about the Human Genome Project and its most recent findings that give a better understanding of human evolution. It is also at Harvard that he meets and falls in love with Claudia Saunders, a scientist and "comrade" in his fight for truth, justice, and peace.

Finally, Nigel goes to work at Bellamy Laboratories while also studying at Harvard, and he is able to realize his dream. Working with Professor Bellamy, he helps create a robot the world has been waiting for-MUINOTULP-632, a ten-legged "insect" that can devour an entire nuclear bomb thousands of miles away, rendering the weapon harmless.