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 pre-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.
WILLIAM McCAULEY has earned his living as a
salesman, oceanographer, stock broker,
geophyicist, and now technical writer. In the
1980’s he worked and lived in a German fisheries
development program in West Africa. He has
published several stories and now lives in
Kirkland, Washington.