MALAWI JOURNALS PROJECT
Susan Cotts Watkins
Adam Ashforth
31 March 2015
INTRODUCTION
In the Malawi Journals Project, which began in 1999, young rural Malawians with a high
school education have been keeping diaries recording conversations among rural residents
pertaining to AIDS, love, sex, illness, life, death, and more – much more.[1] This observational
field journal project provides a rare picture of responses to the AIDS epidemic. The journals
were produced by a total of 22 writers, each containing about 10-15 pages of single-spaced text.
These texts constitute a unique archive not only of the epidemic in Africa but also of everyday
life in rural villages at the turn of the millennium.
Until 2008, the journals project, led by Susan Watkins, was part of the larger Malawi Diffusion
and Ideational Change Project (also known as the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and
Health) at the University of Pennsylvania. Subsequently, the project moved to the University of
Michigan, where it is directed by Adam Ashforth of the Department of Afroamerican and
African Studies and benefits from funding by the African Studies Center, both at the University
of Michigan.
Since 2008, there have been four journalists working in Balaka District, Malawi, three women
and one man; a fifth died in mysterious circumstances in 2010. All four have been working with
the project since the beginning and all are, in their very different ways, gifted observers of life in
their communities. One, for example, is a drinker who harvests stories from the bars and kachaso
dens of Balaka Town in between bouts as a Born Again Christian when he regales us in detail
with the goings on in his church; another is a devout Muslim to whom women gravitate with
tales of the hardships of life. The money they receive from writing journals, though a modest
sum, is crucial to their livelihoods.
This archive of journals is made publicly available under the auspices of the University of
Michigan through the International Consortium for Social and Political Research. More details
are available in an Introduction to the Journals, written by Amy Kaler and Susan Watkins early
in the project’s life; another document, Guidelines to the Journals, provides important remarks
on confidentiality and editing. The typing and anonymization of the journals was done by
Denview Magalasy, of the NGO Invest in Knowledge.
HISTORY
The Malawi Journals Project was an unexpected outcome of Watkins’ interest in the quality of
reporting in a longitudinal survey she and Eliya Zulu began in rural villages in three districts of
Malawi (Balaka in the South, Mchinji in the Center, and Rumphi in the North). The first round
was conducted in 1998, a time when there was a great deal of concern about the AIDS epidemic,
both on the part of international organizations and national organizations, as well as in the
villages and the cities of Malawi. The survey thus asked many questions about knowledge of
AIDS and how to prevent it, and questions about the sexual behavior of the respondents in the
survey. Since in Malawi, as in other parts of Africa, HIV is transmitted primarily through
heterosexual relationships, key behavioral questions were about the number of sexual partners
the respondents had currently and in the past. Examining the data from the survey question on
the number of the respondents’ sexual partners, Watkins and Zulu noticed that the reports of
partners seemed implausibly low. This suggested deliberate misreporting.
Watkins began to ask interviewers what they had heard people say about AIDS in informal
settings, rather than in the formal context of the survey—for example, when they were chatting
with people they met as they went through the villages. Although the interviewers had no more
than a high school education, their accounts were often quite vivid, and provided insights into the
villagers’ responses to the epidemic that could not be gleaned from the survey.
After the survey was completed and the interviewers were ready to return to their villages and to
subsistence farming, we asked a few of those who had particularly impressed us whether they
would like to continue working for us. Their assignment was simply to recall and write down
anything they heard people say about AIDS during the course of their daily lives: they were no
longer to be interviewers, asking questions, but rather participant observers, just listening and
then writing. They were told not to take notes, and to do their writing in private and to keep their
journals in a place where others could not read them. They were eager to take on this work—this
was not surprising, as there are few ways to earn money in rural Malawi: villagers survived by
subsistence farming, sometimes supplemented with small-scale retail activities. We provided
them with an 80-page exercise book, of the sort used in classes.
The notebooks were written in English, which is taught in the schools, translating conversations
from, mostly, Chichewa with key terms noted in the original language. Each notebook is the
equivalent to 10-15 pages of single-spaced typewritten text (depending on the handwriting of the
journalist. Each month, an assistant would collect the notebooks from the journal writers, pay
them, type the journals in MSWord, and email them to us in the United States.
[1] For a description of the methodology, see Susan Watkins and Ann Swidler, “Hearsay
ethnography: conversational journals as a method for studying culture in action,” Poetics, 37
(2009) pp. 162-184.
[2] Click here to listen to This American Life's radio program on the Malawi Journals Project
(Originally aired 08.26.2011).
[3] For examples of publications drawing on this material, see
“Narratives of Death in Rural Malawi in a Time of AIDS.” Africa 85 (1) 2015: 1–23. (Adam
Ashforth and Susan C.Watkins).
“Popular Moralities and Institutional Rationalities in Malawi’s Struggle Against AIDS.” 2014.
Population and Development Review 40 (3): 447-473 (Nicole Angotti, Margaret Frye, Amy
Kaler, Michelle Poulin,, Sara.Yeatman & Susan C.Watkins).
“AIDS Exceptionalism: Another Constituency Heard From.” 2013. AIDS and Behavior 17 (3):
825-831 (Kim Yi Dionne, Patrick Gerland & Susan Watkins).
"Asking God About the Date You Will Die: HIV Testing As a Zone of Uncertainty in Rural
Malawi." 2010. Demographic Research 32: 905-932 (Amy. Kaler & Susan C. Watkins).
"Ties of Dependence: AIDS and Transactional Sex in Rural Malawi."2006. Studies in Family
Planning 38(3): 147-162 (Ann Swidler & Susan C. Watkins).
"'When They See Money and They Think It's Life': Money, Modernity and Morality in Two
Sites in Rural Malawi." 2006. Journal of Southern African Studies 32(2):335-49 (Amy Kaler).
"Navigating AIDS in Rural Malawi," 2004. Population and Development Review, 30 (4): 673705. (Susan C. Watkins)
"AIDS-Talk in Everyday Life: the Presence of HIV/AIDS in Men's Informal Conversation in
Southern Malawi." 2004. Social Science & Medicine 59(2):285-97(Amy Kaler)
"The Moral Lens of Population Control: Condoms and Controversies in Southern Malawi."
2004. Studies in Family Planning 35(2):105-15 (Amy Kaler).
A sister project in Agincourt, South Africa, used the ethnographic journals methodology:
“Implementing ‘Insider’ Ethnography: Lessons from the Public Conversations about HIV/AIDS
Project in Rural South Africa.” 2014. Qualitative Research. DOI: 10.1177/1468794114543402.
(Nicole Angotti & Christie Sennott).
“Working with Teams of ‘Insiders’: Qualitative Approaches to Data Collection in the Global
South” Forthcoming. Demographic Research (Enid Schatz, Nicole Angotti, Sangeetha
Madhavan, & Christie Sennott).