How I Learned to Understand the World

by Hans Rosling

  I was taught a lot of geography at school but in the end was left with the feeling that I knew amazingly little about how people lived in other parts of the world. Generally speaking, school instilled a worldview based on a vague notion of “the West” against “the Rest.” “The Rest” was where “the natives” lived and, apparently, their cultures were pretty primitive.

  My teacher in, I think, year five (we were twelve years old then) once memorably insisted that Hinduism made people in India fatalistic, so persuading them to convert to Christianity was very important for their country’s progress and development. No one taught me anything about India’s ancient civilizations. Long before the Swedes had got round to carving a handful of signs into rune stones, Indians were writing in their own alphabets.

  Did the Soviet Union, Japan, and the South American countries belong to the West or not? We were never told. The progress of colonized nations toward independence was something I heard about at home from my father rather than from my teachers at school. Overall, my mental outlook was shaped at home, influenced by my relatives and especially my mother and father, and the radio broadcasts we listened to. School played a very minor role.

  * * *

  Mum was cured of her TB. Sweden’s economy, and my father’s wages, improved faster than my parents could ever have hoped for. I was only five years old when we moved into a house with a nice garden with plenty of fruit trees. To my parents, the house was a dream come true. They were able to buy it mainly through years of saving, topped up by a loan guaranteed by the state through the growing social housing movement. It was an initiative aimed at stimulating home ownership for the working class. They also had to take on a private bank loan and a generous loan offered by my unmarried uncle, Martin.

  The house was new and modern: it had central heating, running hot and cold water, a bathroom with an enameled tub, and a kitchen with an electric cooker, a fridge, and a washing machine. The local library was nearby, just down the street. Mum regularly walked with me to borrow books that she would read to me. Other families with children lived in the neighboring houses and I soon got friendly with some of them.

  My father used to like to show me the massive cables from the generating station at Bergeforsen and explain how the hydro power was transformed into electric current for our washing machine. One of his favorite enterprises was to go around picking up large pine branches from forest clearings near the city. His employers let him have weekend use of a company car so he could transport the branches home to become fuel for our central heating and water boiler.

  My parents’ garden was largely devoted to useful plants: they grew potatoes, various vegetables, apples and strawberries. Mum sewed almost all our clothes because buying ready-made was expensive, with one exception: underpants. I remember when imported underwear was first in the shops, and how my mum would chat over the hedge with our neighbors about the pros and cons of foreign undies: what if wearing them was bad for children’s health? This early, embryonic sign of global trading in consumer goods—underpants from Portugal—was instantly seen as deeply suspect.

  Our saving and skimping meant that, after a few years in our new house, we could go on family holidays. My parents bought a red moped and a blue tandem bicycle, and Mum actually sewed a tent for us. The first time, we toured Uppsala County and were never farther than about a hundred kilometers from our house. We ended up visiting Grandma Agnes’s two unmarried brothers, who lived together on the family farm and welcomed us warmly.

  I was allowed to ride bareback on their large horse, led by Petrus, the older brother. When my dad photographed me on the horse, it highlighted a clash of cultures. Pappa thought one snap was especially successful: the massive farm horse with the city boy on its back, next to the old farmer in his tall boots.

  Hans as a child on a horse

  He sent a copy of the photograph to Petrus as a gesture of appreciation for the hospitality we had been shown. It was not well received. Petrus was offended because the photo showed him in his overalls and boots. If he was to be photographed it would only be when he wore his single dark suit. If city folk took photos of him in his working clothes, they presumably intended to make fun of their country-bumpkin relative. My parents eventually settled the conflict but it took them the best part of two years. It was a reminder always to respect cultural differences. Petrus was a wise, kind man and that made the lesson all the more effective.

  We took the moped on our second holiday and traveled as far as Copenhagen. My brother, Mats, was born in 1960, when I was twelve years old. Three years later, the family invested in a gray VW Beetle and we went on holiday to Norway. Then in 1972, my parents took another big step by buying a piece of land by the sea. My dad built a holiday cottage on the site. He used the money he had inherited from his mother to buy a small boat with an outboard engine and gave it her name—Berta.

  Having been a housewife for over a decade, my mother got a part-time job in a library in nearby Old Uppsala. She also went to adult education college every evening to get secondary-school competence in Swedish, English, and Social Studies—but she never got the real education she always dreamed of, which would have allowed her to become a teacher or a journalist.

  The story of my family was mirrored countrywide by so many others and demonstrated exceptionally fast and positive changes in all aspects of life in Sweden. To get from my grandma’s four years of basic schooling to my professorial chair took just three generations. To give an example of an even more dramatic change: four generations ago, my great-grandmother was illiterate. As a family, we reflect the different levels of education in today’s world.

  * * *

  It is easy to see the four economical levels in the world exemplified in the context of my family. Improved healthcare allowed people to escape the burden of infectious disease and to lead longer, healthier lives. Rising material welfare meant that it took only a couple of generations to move from shacks with dirt floors to spacious modern houses. Yet none of this would have seemed straightforward to the individuals themselves who, step by step, achieved life-changing personal advances.

  2

  Discovering the World

  I had always been curious about the world, so I saved up money to go traveling. When I was sixteen, I embarked, on my own, on a cycling trip that took me around England and Wales. I remember, when I stopped to look around the first village on my route, seeing a stone column inscribed with names: a list of all the villagers who had died in the First World War, almost twenty names from such a small community. As I walked around the lovingly looked-after monument, I saw another list of names, almost as long, of those who had died in the Second World War.

  Faced with my first British war memorial, I assumed the village must have suffered exceptional losses. But over the next six weeks, as I cycled though Wales, Somerset, Devon, and along the south coast back to London, I saw similar war memorials in almost every town and village. And in conversations with other young people I met on my trip, I learned that often one or both of their parents had been killed or injured during the war.

  I finally began to grasp what my dad had tried to tell me about these huge, recent wars; their cruelty as well as their extent and how differently countries in Europe had been affected. Growing up in Sweden had made it difficult for me to fully take on board twentieth-century European history.

  In the summer of 1966, aged eighteen, I hitchhiked to Paris, then down to the Riviera and farther south to Rome. From the heel of Italy I went by boat to Greece. The Greek countryside was unlike anything I had ever seen before. Many family homes looked like very basic shelters. Old ladies, with covered heads and dressed in black, walked along the road carrying huge loads of wood on their backs. Traveling back to Sweden through Macedonia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, and Germany was a journey of gradually improving conditions.

  My way home went via Berlin. At the time, the Berlin Wall had been in place for five years. I crossed the border at Checkpoint C
harlie and spent the whole day walking around East Berlin. It was an effective vaccination against extreme left-wing views: one brief visit to the GDR made it easy to detest communism.

  In 1968 Agneta and I traveled south together. Stage one took us to one of Stockholm’s southernmost metro stations. We had agreed we would start hitchhiking from there. And just at that spot, outside a big office block, we had our first quarrel.

  The slip road to the southbound motorway was just a short stretch away so, obviously, I wanted to get on with it. Agneta gestured at the sun, which was nearing the top of its course across the sky and said that it was lunchtime—we should have something to eat. We stared doubtfully at each other.

  “Let’s snack on something while we try to get a car to stop,” I said.

  “Hundreds of cars pass by here every minute,” Agneta pointed out. “We have all summer ahead of us. Look over there, a seat in the shade and a nice view into the park. Come on, we should eat the food I packed now. It’s in your bag.”

  I don’t mind skipping meals but on the first day of our first joint holiday, she made it very clear that I ought to change my bad habits. We had an enjoyable, romantic picnic in the park. The rest of the day went well, too: we hitchhiked all the way to the south of Sweden and stopped at a charming hostel where we, a couple of nineteen-year-olds, took a family room for the night. It meant that we could be alone together without other backpackers turning up to join us.

  Agneta was already in bed when I came out after my shower.

  “Our toothbrushes are in the toiletries bag on the edge of the basin,” she told me.

  I located the gear and started brushing. Odd-tasting toothpaste, I thought, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the love of my life, who was watching me smilingly from the bed. Such a very warm smile. Then she began to giggle and, after a few seconds, burst out laughing. I didn’t get it. It unnerves a romantic youth wearing only a towel when his girlfriend laughs at him. Agneta was still laughing when my field of vision filled with white foam bubbling out of my mouth. She came over to help me. I had been brushing my teeth with shampoo.

  We traveled far that summer, first by ferry across the Baltic Sea to Poland then onward through Eastern Europe to Istanbul. We took more or less the same route back home.

  By the time I left school, ready for university, I had traveled through most of Europe, east and west. Now, my obsession with understanding the world had moved on to the greater part, which was outside Europe. It was a major change.

  I grew up during the Cold War and to my generation the future depended on whether a nuclear war between East and West could be avoided. In 1968, the Soviet Union occupied Czechoslovakia and crushed the “Prague Spring,” a series of liberalizing reforms by that country’s government. It was a big set-back but there were also some inspiring aspects to this episode. It suggested that communism might well begin to crumble internally.

  My generation had become intensely aware of the need for better living conditions almost everywhere in the world. I had heard the missionary father of my third-year classmate list the fundamental things that needed improving: education, healthcare, roads and jobs. The world at large had not benefited from the kinds of social changes that had meant so much to my family and our wider circle of relatives.

  It baffled me that the West supported so many regimes with little interest in useful reforms, while poor, communist countries such as Cuba, Vietnam, and China were actually on the move, making better decisions, and showing unmistakable signs of social advances. It was truly confusing—but I never joined the wave of extreme left-wing protest either in 1968 or later. I felt antipathy toward communism, and social democracy gave me a deep-rooted sense of belonging.

  When I started university, the dominant conflict was still the Vietnam War. By this time, the Vietnamese regime that the US army was propping up seemed to have no prospects of survival. During my final years at the Cathedral School in Uppsala, I had initially been alone in my opposition to America’s role in Vietnam. But at university, my interest in politics dwindled just as it was increasing among most of the other students.

  I have always disliked the romanticizing of revolutions and glorifying of armed conflict. People who are keen on politics tend to overrate the impact of political reforms. In fact, effective reform of living conditions is rarely due to policies and mostly to changes in the conditions for development. The man who guided me to think along those lines was a Mozambican scientist working in the USA. I met him for the first time in the autumn of 1967.

  * * *

  In 1960s Sweden, it was common to have grown up in a simple home and for your father to work in a factory. But to be the first in your family to go to university was rare and special. Now, a few weeks into my first year as a student, I felt that joining the Social Democrats was allowing me to fulfill an unspoken expectation of my parents back home.

  The small student society had made me its international secretary and given me a task straightaway: to organize an evening session for our group to meet a man called Eduardo Mondlane.

  Mondlane had been born and grew up in Mozambique. He was one of the first Black students from his home country to be sponsored to attend an American university. The USA offered plenty of opportunities for talented people and Mondlane had eventually become an associate professor at Syracuse University in New York. Later, he had left his academic career behind and returned to Africa, where he led FRELIMO, the Mozambican Liberation Front, headquartered in recently independent Tanzania. In 1964, FRELIMO had crossed the border and begun an armed insurrection against the Portuguese government.

  Eduardo Mondlane had now come to Sweden on a mission to raise Swedish support for the independence fighters. I was very embarrassed that only eight students had turned up to listen to him. When his taxi stopped outside, I was expecting an African Che Guevara. But instead of a bearded guerrilla in camouflage kit and boots, the man who emerged from the car was a clean-shaven gentleman in a sober gray suit and well-polished shoes. He put me at ease when I apologized for the small audience, and the moment he was inside suggested that we should sit on the sofas around the coffee table in the corner.

  His outward appearance was reserved and ordinary, but what he had to tell us was mind-blowing. It is no exaggeration to say that the well-argued case he presented during the next two hours would prove decisive for my entire professional life to come.

  In summary, this is what he said: “We, the black Mozambicans, have no quarrel with the white race in general, nor with the Portuguese language and culture. We confine our struggle to gaining independence for our country from the colonial rulers sent by the fascist regime in Lisbon. War is terrible but we are forced to fight for our freedom. I believe the outcome will be not only liberation of our own country but also freeing Portugal of fascism.”

  What followed was still more thought-provoking: “Actually, becoming independent is the easy part. We will win our liberation war because the Portuguese soldiers think dying in defense of fascism and colonialism is an undignified death. Winning the war is one thing but the harder task facing us Mozambicans is to improve living conditions for the people. Their expectations will be so high and our capacity to meet them will be so limited.”

  He was referring to the difficulties experienced by most of the recently independent African countries. His conclusion was that Mozambique, with its very high incidence of illiteracy and near-total lack of highly educated people, would find dealing with the problems of development even more challenging than these other countries. It impressed me tremendously to hear a commander of a war discuss postwar challenges.

  Before he left, he said farewell to each one of us personally.

  “What are you studying? And when are your final exams?” he asked me.

  I was nineteen, a first-year undergraduate taking a course in statistics before starting my medical training. The thought of finals had not yet entered my head. I probably stuttered as I said: “My medical studies are due to start nex
t term and I’ll qualify … as a doctor in … 1975.”

  “Excellent. By then, Mozambique should be an independent state. Promise you’ll come to work with us as a doctor. We will need you,” Mondlane said and smiled. Then our eyes met, his face went serious and, as we shook hands, I heard myself say: “Yes. I promise.”

  Two years later, on February 3, 1969, Eduardo Mondlane was murdered by a targeted explosion in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania. I was reminded of my promise but knew that this loss made it more likely that the Mozambican liberation struggle would fail.

  Eduardo Mondlane had helped us to understand the tragedy of having to go to war to achieve independence, and that his war was waged against the colonizing state and not against the people who had come to colonize his country. What he said stayed with me. I would later hear Nelson Mandela speak in the same spirit. It took another ten years before I was able to take up a medical post in Mozambique, and it took me a lifetime to fully understand Mondlane’s central message: becoming independent is relatively easy. What is more difficult is to develop a country suffering from the illiteracy, disease, and extreme poverty left in the wake of generations of colonial rule.

  * * *

  I was elected to the International Committee of the Uppsala Student Union early on in my medical studies.

  One day, the secretary maneuvered me into the corridor and whispered in my ear: “Never ask that question again.” During the meeting that had just concluded in the room next door, I had raised a concern about the budget. The accounts included a vaguely described investment in a trust that had inexplicably lost a great deal of money.