Adam Ashforth is Visiting Associate Professor in the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies.

THE MALAWI JOURNALS PROJECT is a unique collection of more than 700 journals kept by rural Malawians over the past decade, the product of a large-scale and long- term indigenous ethnography project initiated by Prof. Susan Watkins of the University of Pennsylvania's Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project. The aim of this project was to document the ways people talk of AIDS in everyday contexts, to gather the stories they tell each other as they make sense of the epidemic.

The journals project is currently being transferred to the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan in partnership with the Center for Social Research in the University of Malawi with a view to continuing support for the journal writers.

After its first ten years, the journals project constitutes an extraordinary archive of local responses to the global epidemic in rural African villages. This paper describes the project and presents an example of one of the journals, an account of two young men in a village market responding to the President's call in a radio broadcast to “break the silence” about AIDS, in order to illustrate the richness of this material as a source of insight into everyday responses to the epidemic in rural Africa.