In apartheid-era South Africa, Shack Twala, a black revolutionary who had served time on Robben Island, is freed by Rina van Niekerk , his Afrikaner defence attorney, because he would be a victim of retroactive legislation.

The three fugitives are followed and monitored by BOSS to lead them to discover their escape route to Botswana and its facilitators, Indian dentists Anil Mukarjee and Persis Ray; a stash of stolen uncut diamonds being used to fund the Black Congress Party and its leader, a man named Wilby Xaba.

Diamonds in hand, they have arranged for Blane, a private pilot, to fly them out of the country, which he does after Rina blackmails him by threatening to make public his drug usage and relationships with black women, illegal in South Africa.

Suddenly, BOSS agents arrive in a commandeered lorry, kill the guards, and take Wilby prisoner, revealing that he was their real target all along and that the diamonds retrieved from the sinkhole were forgeries.

To date, he has added ittle to the genre but an evident relish for exploitative chunks of violence, and if The Wilby Conspiracy is less disreputable than Soldier Blue in this respect, it has similar failings in many others: a careless way of chopping between the scenes of political message-mongering and the crudely engineered boosts of the action; a rough, schematic kind of dialogue whenever characters declare themselves on the issues, a flip, bantering, comedy-thriller style of delivery elsewhere ...The Wilby Conspiracy is so negligible as a political drama mainly because as a thriller it is reduced to the level of a Biggles adventure.