The predicament of a white girl in the Belgian Congo and the terrible legacy of her American father.

Leodine, the daughter of Astrid, a beautiful Fleming, and of Gregory McNeil, a young buoyant G.I. whom the latter had met in Northern France during WWII, grows up in the Belgian Congo with her mother, after her father died in a plane crash, flying from America to rejoin his family.  After a couple of years, Astrid falls in love with Piet Van den Berg, and the latter will move in with them.  Leodine is surrounded by the love of her mother and of Piet, whom she now considers as her stepfather, as well as by the affection of her maternal grandparents and of her uncle Jeff, still an adolescent.  One day her uncle, eavesdropping on his parents, will reveal to her that her deceased American father had a black great-grandmother.  This news shatters the young girl and she becomes obsessed with the fact that she is of Adopted by an American homosexual in the Belgian Congo, although she is so fair that no one could ever surmise it.  But from this moment on her existence becomes a calvary.  This will determine her whole future: she has decided never to marry, nor to bear a child who might be darker than herself.

The only friend she has at school is a pretty mulatto girl, half Portuguese, half-Angolan, named Yolande, and she finally decides to divulge to her the terrible secret. Later on, Yolande introduces her to her cousin Mario-Tende, a refined and intelligent student who lives at the Cité Indigène.  One afternoon, her dear uncle Jeff is run over by a truck and she is so devastated, she feels she’s become an orphan.  Mario-Tende offers to tutor her in the subjects she finds most difficult.  A friendship evolves between the two, inasmuch as her uncle has left a huge void in her heart and that she can’t but compare him to Mario-Tende, for the two boys were about the same age and they were both bright and diligent students. But one day the young man makes love to her.  Panic-stricken, leodine opens up to her mother, believing she is pregnant.  But she is lucky and gets her periods.  Astrid and her family decide that after this grave occurrence to send the young girl away from the Congo.  And it is thus that Leodine will go and study in far away Minnesota, where her paternal grandparents live.  After college, she joins an Adventist convent, specialized in missionary work.  She learns that Mario-Tende was killed in Angola, fighting for the independence of his country. Three decades after she left the Congo she will return to the land of her birth and witness the horror wrought following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.  Keeping to her promise, she never marries nor bears any child.  But she will adopt a little Mozambican boy and name him ... Mario-Tende.