Set in the mid-sixties during apartheid, in a state called the Free State, Miraculous Weapons tells the story of a South African death row inmate, played by Cameroonian Emil Aboussolo M’bo, and three women in his life: his wife, a prison teacher and a European pen pal. By not revealing the reason for Djamal's fifteen-year imprisonment and death sentence, the director condemns the death penalty absolutely and points to Black liberation struggles in a transatlantic perspective (for Bekolo is certainly referring to American citizen Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther who has been imprisoned for the past forty-two years). Indeed, borrowing its title from the eponymous collection of poems by Aimé Césaire (1946), the Martinique poet and champion of negritude and the liberation of Black peoples, the film is described by the director not only as a manifesto in favor of abolishing the death penalty, but as a hymn to life.