Plot

'Osuofia in London' offers a variation on an old story: a country bumpkin comes to town, where city slickers try -- and ultimately fail -- to take advantage of him and steal his money.

Osuofia lives in a village in south-eastern Nigeria where he talks a lot and drinks a lot of palm wine. His main occupation is as a hunter, at which he is spectacularly unsuccessful. He is hounded by his creditors, and henpecked by his massive wife and five grown-up daughters.

Then one day a lawyer's letter arrives to tell him that a long-forgotten brother has died in Britain, leaving him all his money. Osuofia has to go to London to claim his inheritance.

This allows the director to have a lot of fun as Osuofia comes face to face with modern plumbing, a full English breakfast, a butler called Jeeves and a park full of pigeons, which finally arouse his hunter's instincts.

Meanwhile the crooked lawyer and his glamorous accomplice Samantha (a flame-haired temptress with a disconcerting resemblance to the young Rebecca Brooks) are working to get him to sign away his inheritance. But the thieves fall out and Osuofia makes it back to Nigeria with his fortune intact -- but accompanied by the predatory Samantha, her eyes still firmly on his chequebook.

All of which sets things up nicely for a sequel, as Samantha battles with the challenges of life in an African village, and the implacable hostility of the the first Mrs Osuofia.