As a 19-year-old pre-medical student at Yale University in 1970, Henry Louis Gates Junior spent six months working in a hospital in a village called Kilimatinde near Dar es Salaam. Twenty-five years on, as professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard, he returns to Africa with his wife Sharron Adams and daughters Liza and Maggie, to give the girls their first taste of Africa. They travel 3000 miles through three African countries, first through Zimbabwe, calling at the Victoria Falls, then on through Zambia and Tanzania, and finally on to Kilimatinde retracing Henry's tracks from 25 years earlier, and even meeting two of the people he knew then.