Restaurant owner Tang the 11th, learning his older brother, Tang the First is ill, returns to the his remote native village, long plagued by leprosy. Superstition holds that a cure can be obtained when a family of five sons and five daughters makes possible the death of a fish from the Lake of Heaven, since the leprosy remedy is in the flesh of this fish. It just so happens that Tang the 11th has five sons, four daughters, and a pregnant wife.

After years spent in Paris, Clotaire Sangala returns to his native country, Africa. Raised by a Chinese martial arts grandfather, convinced to have been found in a garbage can, Clotaire knows nothing of the glorious past of his parents. He will become "Black Snake", the masked and ultra-sapped superhero, liberator of the people against the dictator Hezekiah.