A white Peace Corps volunteer named Peter voyages to Britain after the conclusion of his mission in Africa. His roommates on the boat are deeply religious African reverends and Peter feels awkward for being the only non-African in second class and faithless compared to his devoted cabin mates. At breakfast, he waits for someone to sit at his table but no one does. Four days later, he is still in awe at the devotion of his roommates to their faith and calculates the time they spend in prayer. He thinks they must view him as a heathen. 

On the ship deck, Peter finds Mr. Babili, a Cameroonian man he’d spoken with the day before and they stare at the fish in the water below. Mr. Babili walks away from him and Peter goes to the library, feeling slightly insulted at being abandoned by his fellow passenger. After spending two years on his mission, he still finds it difficult to hold a conversation longer than five minutes with an African person, but he hopes this will be different with Mr. Babili. He feels changed after his mission and as though he will have to “re-discover” Europe when he returns. 

Peter talks with other passengers and learns that one is going to attend journalism school, one to explore London and another to be a prostitute. When the ship stops in Freetown, he joins Mr. Babili in the second-class bar, who tells him he’s anxious to get to the next stop in four days that’s out of Africa. Peter flirts with Miss Morgan before deciding she’s too old for him and then remembering his religious roommates will make it difficult for him to be with a woman anyway. Every night, Peter drinks two or three bottles of Guinness to sleep through his roommates’ snores. The bartender asks him why he doesn’t go to the first-class bar where the white passengers are and Peter refuses, thinking he will never get used to whiteness again. 

Mr. Babili joins him again at the bar and asks him why, if he’s not religious, did he come to Africa to convert Africans. Peter tries to defend the peace corps volunteers but realizes quickly that he’s lost. He tells Mr. Babili that when they get to London he’d like to show him around the city and the Cameroonian replies skeptically, saying that when they return to the city, Peter will have to place himself above Black people again and he will likely begin to do what all white missionaries have done: champion their travels and look down on Africans with pity instead of respect. Peter refuses to accept this, but they still continue to talk in the bar throughout the rest of the journey. 

One night, Mr. Babili brings along an African woman named Miss Ogene for Peter. They leave the bar to go to the empty second-class lounge where they kiss and nothing more because he’s uncomfortable with making love in the same room as his roommates. When Peter returns to the bar, Mr. Babili confesses that when he was in Las Palamas he had sex with a white prostitute, a fact that shocks Peter. 

The day before their arrival, Peter watches a mother breastfeeding her baby, as he does every day. This particular day, the woman throws her child into the ocean. Later, Mr. Babili asks him why he decided to travel in second class and when Peter replies because of the lower cost Mr. Babili says he doesn’t believe him and thinks it’s because Peter wishes he was African and wanted to sleep with African women. He tells Peter that Miss Ogene claims Peter has been sleeping with her, which is untrue, and that she is now demanding money. Mr. Babili demands that Peter give him the money and Peter feels betrayed. He asks Mr. Babili about the woman who threw her child overboard and Mr. Babili replies that it was a practical choice, given that her husband didn’t know about the child. 

Peter leaves the bar wanting to talk to a white person and wishes he were already in London. The two men part ways and he returns to the room where he was shocked to find one of his reverend roommates in bed with an African woman. He spends the rest of the night in the first-class bar drinking scotch.