This is an erudite book with a provocative argument that is engagingly made primarily through anecdotes and ethnographic observation gathered in dozens of visits to Malawi by the authors over a period of nearly 20 years. The central metaphor is one of romantic infatuation between very unequal partners with low self-awareness and disquietingly misinformed impressions of each other. On the one hand are the donors from the West who want to fight AIDS. On the other are the brokers – Africans who connect the donors to the object of their desire, the ‘villagers’ who are at risk or who have already contracted HIV. The donors desire to do something good like saving Africans from themselves by changing African sexual mores. They believe, often with intense emotionality, that the brokers want and are able to help them achieve that goal. The brokers, however, primarily just want to get a leg up in this world and see donors as way out of poverty.

Many absurdities arise from these conflicting motives and star-crossed desires. ‘I think AIDS is good’ (p. 34), says one villager impressed by the job opportunities it has created (p. 90). Informants testify to how much fun the AIDS dramatisations are, and, implicitly, the opportunities they create for wooing new sex partners or learning about new sexual practices. The authors provide poignant evidence of numerous other ‘working misunderstandings’ around core concepts in the AIDS industry such as stigma, orphans, harmful cultural practices, trainings and gender-based violence. These work in the sense of enabling money to be spent and forms appropriately filled out, but they do not achieve the stated objectives. On the contrary, ‘donors, rather than promoting the modern rationality they hope to teach Africans, create a capricious, unpredictable world’ (p. 121) that is a recipe for failure.

The authors generally have a great deal of respect for their subjects, and they include themselves in the critique. This saves the book from sounding condescending or (too) cynical. They write in a moving, story-telling way that recalls Jonny Steinberg's Sizwe's Test or Elizabeth Pisani's The Wisdom of Whores. This reflects their central methodology, which the authors describe as ‘motel ethnography’ (16): they stayed at various low budget rural motels and chatted with people. They also collected over a thousand personal journals kept by brokers and villagers. This is supplemented by documentary research including sometimes cringe-worthy, self-deluding testimonials found on donor blogs.

The book concludes with some thoughtful suggestions to donors. For example, learn what the ‘villagers’ really want as opposed to what we think they need. With that in mind, greater attention will likely go to providing clean water than lessons on ‘women's empowerment’. Modesty, incrementalism, honest learning through critical self-evaluation, and flexibility will ultimately serve everyone better than the dogmatic application (through unreliable middlemen and women) of universal so-called best practices.

These suggestions are eminently sensible. I should nonetheless point out some problems with the book that limit its usefulness as a teaching aid. It is based on fieldwork in one small country. Why then does the title claim it is about ‘Africa’? No doubt there are many points of convergence and analogy between Malawi and ‘Africa’, but there are times when the evidence was stretched too far for the argument. For example, they state that little stigma exists among Africans against people living with AIDS based, in part, on written self-reporting by rural Malawian informants. Ergo, Western donors erroneously prioritise fighting stigma. I wonder what Gugu Dlamini would make of this, the Durban woman murdered by her community members for coming out with her HIV positive status?

Why also refer to the non-broker part of the African population as ‘villagers’? Lilongwe has a population of over a million, and elsewhere on the continent many cities of multiple millions contain people who travel widely to the West and consume global media. And why boil the motivations of donors down to one thing – altruism – when there are many factors that bring them to places like Malawi, including geo-political calculations and naked commercial or partisan interests. So-called altruism is part of a bigger and often exceedingly brutal package that shores up a grossly inequitable international system. Allowing the conceit of altruism to stand lets that system off the hook.

Finally, Swidler and Watkins entirely neglect one ‘working misunderstanding’ that has caused a lot of anxiety and suffering in Malawi and beyond: the assumed non-existence or insignificance of men who have sex with men. This group of people gets exactly one mention in the whole book, notwithstanding current estimates that they comprise as much as 20% of the new infections and often serve as a vicarious attack on ‘women's empowerment’. Failure to see this, ironically, proves one of Swidler and Watkins’ main points.