No one thought he'd ever dare to return. In this African country where the dictatorship has banned all forms of cultural expression, the storyteller named Once-Upon-A-Time has already had a brush with death. For refusing to stop performing his puppet shows, he lost both his hands, severed at the wrist with the slash of a machete. Now he's back, ready to begin performing again, and ready to take on the powers that be...

Virtuoso Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe is invited out to the Congo by the governor to give a concert. How could he refuse such an invitation? Eugène waves goodbye to the infamous gray Belgian skies and hops on a plane taking him to the dazzling colors of Africa. He is invited to stay a few weeks at his nephew's house, by the stunning Lake Maï Ndombé. And that's where he meets Turntable. Through their mutual appreciation of music, the servant and the celebrity gradually form an unlikely friendship, breaking the boundaries of convention.

Yu Kiang works for a Chinese lumberjack corporation in the Congo. Despite his company's ban on its employees from frequenting the local girls, Yu has fallen for a Congolese woman, Antoinette... and, in a very different way, for Antoinette's little daughter, Marie-Léontine. One night, in the arms of his lover, Yu discovers Antoinette's wound: a terrible scar, an assault on her femininity. How many others are there like her, exiled from their own body, victims of a monstrous ongoing tradition? How many? 150 million. But the only thing that matters to Yu and Antoinette is that little Marie-Léontine never falls victim to the tradition that her mother had to suffer.