Crying for Our Elders: African Orphanhood in the Age of HIV and AIDS by Kristen E. Cheney, and: A Fraught Embrace: The Romance and Reality of AIDS Altruism in Africa by Ann Swidler and Susan Cotts Watkins (review)

Twenty years ago, in the relatively early days of a global response to the AIDS epidemic, the UNICEF report Children on the Brink (1997) introduced a new definition of orphanhood—any child under the age of eighteen who lost one or both parents—along with the dire prediction that the number of AIDS orphans worldwide would continue to rise over the next decade. To varying degrees both Ann Swidler and Susan Cotts Watkins, in A Fraught Embrace: The Romance and Reality of AIDS Altruism in Africa, and Kristen Cheney, in Crying For Our Elders: African Orphanhood in the Age of HIV and AIDS, draw upon this conceptual image of the "African AIDS orphan" to frame their arguments about the current era (in Malawi and Uganda, respectively) of what they consider a global AIDS enterprise.

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Swidler and Watkins attempt to add new vocabulary to the lexicon of what may be considered the AIDS-industrial-development complex. For example, their classification of the roles of "altruist," "broker," and "villager" in low-resource settings serves as a useful taxonomy to inform the reading of many other AIDS ethnographies (including Cheney's). The authors attempt to frame AIDS prevention programs as a "romance" between "altruists" (Westerners sending money from afar, whether philanthropic individuals or large international aid and development agencies), "brokers" (educated and/or entrepreneurial Africans who mediate between foreign altruists and locals), and "villagers" (the materially poor objects of altruists' benevolence and brokers' efforts). Swidler and Watkins draw extensively on what they call "motel ethnographies" (16) conducted over nearly twenty years, seemingly ad hoc while they were conducting other research in Malawi from 1998 to 2010 for the University of Pennsylvania's Longitudinal Study of Families and Health. These were boom years for the proliferation of both multinational NGOs and local AIDS organizations. Malawi was quickly flooded with large- and small-scale altruists and brokers, ranging from internationally educated workers for large-scale NGOs to district-level operatives providing necessary and at times informal links between elites and the villagers. Supplementing the authors' informal interviews over the years with visiting altruists, local AIDS workers, and entrepreneurial brokers were the more than twelve hundred diaries "written . . . by local ethnographers" (17), field journals which provide on-the-ground insight regarding AIDS programming in Malawi. These various sources lend an intimately detailed perspective to the work.

A Fraught Embrace begins with this thesis:

AIDS altruism inspired powerful fantasies. Donors in wealthy countries, particularly those hoping to prevent, rather than just treat AIDS, have imagined that they can protect Africans by transforming them. Their fantasies have been reciprocated from the African side. Quests for transformation of both self and others constitute the essence of a romance. . . . Western altruists and African brokers enact a romance in another sense too. As in a love story, both long for connection, albeit in different ways. . . . Altruists who come from afar, however, rarely recognize the brokers' fantasies.

(vii–viii)

The book proposes to reveal what the romance of AIDS altruism is like from the brokers' perspective, as opposed to recapitulating the altruists' side of the story. The authors largely achieve this, but conversely, they pay little attention to the villagers, whose reality may be misinterpreted by foreign altruists and cosmopolitan brokers alike.

As in most romances, there are multiple examples of the fantasy gone awry between altruists and brokers. The case of a high-profile female broker who beats a maid...