Fans of Hustling is Not Stealing will be eager for these further adventures of Hawa, the West African bar girl who told her stories to musicologist Chernoff in 1977 and 1979. . . . Hawa has migrated back to her father’s country, Burkina Faso, where she’s working in the nightclubs of Ouagadougou, while periodically visiting her ailing father’s village. She details the complex economic arrangements of bar life--the commission system for hustling drinks, the various rates for sex with bar clients and the informal banking system for safeguarding a girl’s daily take. Indeed, Hawa focuses almost exclusively on bottom-line financials--how to get money out of different sorts of men, the relative benefits of living as a mistress, wife or girlfriend, and the competition from cheap prostitutes. She even discusses the downside of her hustling life: with no husband, she’s devalued in village life and has no income security. Still Hawa prefers this to what she sees as the false security of marriage.

Publishers Weekly

"Exchange Is Not Robbery is the sequel to Hustling Is Not Stealing, an oral history about an illiterate young west African woman called ’Hawa’. John M. Chernoff, a musicologist, began taping Hawa’s rich, exuberant stories in 1977. He first met her in Accra, Ghana in 1971, where she made a precarious living as an ashawo woman--a bar girl or hustler working at the fringes of prostitution--having run away from an abusive marriage that she was sold into at the age of 16. The first book related her experiences hustling in Accra and her migration to Togo and then Burkina Faso. Exchange Is Not Robbery catches up with her in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, not far from the village where her father is from. No longer young, she realises her ashawo lifestyle can’t go on forever. Her tone is darker and less playful than before, though flashes of her old self remain. ’So, you know, our people, they used to say that I’m naughty!’ she tells Chernoff in English, one of the 10 languages she speaks. ’They don’t know what kind of a person I am. Ha!’"

Financial Times

"John Chernoff’s books are important and passionate social documents that show how Hawa and many of her fellow citizens are capable, socially advanced and wry survivors; the challenge left to readers is to ask why these qualities in adversity are so necessary, and how things should be changed to enable ordinary Africans to enjoy the freedom they deserve."

Michael Peel | Times Literary Supplement