The Turning Over

Author(s): William McCauley

Location(s): Mali, Sierra Leone

Genre(s): Fiction

Era(s): 1980s

For several years Robert Kelley lived a primative and happy life in a remote fishing village in the mangrove swamps of Sierra Leone. There he has managed a development project that built a cooperative fisheries station which improved the lives of subsistence fishermen. Finding his development work done, he must turn the station over to the corrupt government Fisheries Division managers, whom he knows from experience will simply steal its resources and go away, leaving the village poorer than ever.Saddened by what the future holds for these poor villagers, he travels to Freetown, the capital, to present his last report to his employer, an English development agency, and leave Sierra Leone for Mali to join Marie, with whom he’s had an intermittent and intense love affair. But when he arrives in Freetown his boss offers him another position, establishing and managing a new project in the heart of a politically unstable region of the country. Robert hesitates to accept for he has already committed himself to joining Marie. When he does make a decision it embroils him in a series of events that have completely unexpected consequences.This love story of two expatriates is set against a lushly pictured West Africa in which the echoes of colonial — even colonial — life are still evident in the corrupting power of the Big Man and equally corrupting privilege of the white expatriate. The Turning Over vividly portrays the last vestiges of that epoch in a world disintegrating into chaos.

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