After graduation, Franklin returned to Nigeria to be thrust into the menacing underworld of warlords, militant groups and kidnappers. On the side of the nominal angels, nothing he learnt in the classroom quite prepared him for the seething Niger Delta conflict.
Equally unprepared was he for the life-altering encounter with Nike Campbell, a prospective lawyer with a troubled conscience who considered herself an unwitting victim of the African diaspora.
Obsessed with clarifying the impetus for timeworn injustice, Nike lured stoic Franklin on an exploration of the historical motivation for slavery, genocide and bigotry - the inglorious bogeymen haunting the dark underbelly of modern civilisation.
At the start of his career as a management consultant, was it Nike who snatched and took Franklin's heart hostage, or was it the other way round? Only time will tell.