The story of "Senghor on the Rocks" begins in Dakar, Senegal on 20 December 2001. On this very day people in Dakar were celebrating the national soccer team's qualification for the Football World Cup, as the breaking news about the death of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the famous poet and the republic's first president, hit the country. Starting at this point the novel follows Austrian camera assistant Martin "Chi" Tschirner, who flew to Dakar for a promotional video job, through a "fast paced adventure that starts as a job, develops into an involuntary journey and culminates in a reflection about the possibilities and limits of cross-cultural understanding", as Florian Ledermann put it in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald.