Chanda is a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl in Harare, Zimbabwe, who suffers from unexplained memory lapses, which become even more worrisome when she starts seeing her totem animal, a zebra, in all sorts of places. But nobody else can see it. Afraid of being institutionalized in a hospital, she follows the advice of an old aunt and sets off for her ancestral village, a backward, primitive settlement without the amenities she is used to in the city. But there she meets the rest of her family, including her grandmother, and learns the hard way who she really is--not a superficial, rich city girl with foreign habits but someone who is somebody, whose name carries a history of her African people.