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This chapter examines the ways public visual culture reorients images, aphorisms, and cultural norms into anti-AIDS messages by focusing on HIV/AIDS poster campaigns in Malawi. It shows how frequently seen and strategically placed public placards can make a state-sponsored campaign effective in transforming entire landscapes of discourse to conform to desired parameters of HIV/AIDS knowledge. The posters display moral, ethical, and aesthetic values that are current in sections of Malawian society, thus offering one strategy for government intervention in a multi-front battle against a devastating and vexing pandemic. The concluding statement of all these posters is: Kukhulupirirana wamba sikungakutetezeni ku kachilombo ka HIV (Just trusting each other cannot protect you against the HIV virus). The term kachilombo (meaning virus) provides a remarkable example of how African languages manage to transliterate medical, technical, or scientific terms into elegant and precisely coined phrases through allegorical or proverbial figurative speech.

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