by Hans Rosling
They were driven by the same ideals and shared fundamental values. Many have wondered how Agneta endured Hans’s relentless intensity. But they were actually very much like each other.
During their last Skåne summer together, they often spoke about their gratitude: “We had much to be grateful for. We understood very well how rich our lives had been. And we had been given opportunities to see so much of the world together.”
Even as the cancer weakened Hans, his talent for, and love of, talking didn’t fade.
“He began to talk the moment he opened his eyes in the morning. No one had a chance to get a word in first. It was no use trying to silence him. He’d just carry on, homing in on another angle,” Agneta remembered.
She smiled absently, looking out over the sea.
Hans could slip into lecturing mode at the family dinner and, once engaged in his own line of argument, block queues at buffet tables and stop everyone from getting at the food.
While the children were still living with their parents, they had a rota for doing household chores. It was very clear about Hans’s responsibilities. It meant that the Rosling home didn’t always have a clean kitchen worktop and so forth—but that was all right. Agneta never expected them to approach domestic issues in the same way.
She was just as tolerant about his periods of parental leave. When Hans was at home looking after their eldest daughter, Anna, when she was a baby, he was reading the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Anna liked biscuits and crawling, so Hans kept her happily occupied by throwing biscuits around the room. He could read a few more lines while she crawled off to find the next biscuit. Similarly, when he was caring for their youngest son, Magnus, the toddler had taken a fancy to the contents of the wastepaper basket. To keep Magnus happy, Hans emptied out the scrunched-up paper on the floor. Meanwhile, Daddy got on with writing his thesis.
Agneta shrugged when she recalled those episodes: “Whatever, it worked both for him and the children.”
It was during this time in their lives that Hans decided the children’s core diet should be porridge. He had taken on board that children need to eat something around five o’clock every evening. Fixing a pot of porridge was easy, and to amuse everyone he gave it a stylish name: “oat flake soufflé.” It came in four basic varients: normal, burned, salted, and unsalted. The kids only protested if he forgot the salt.
Hans would frequently lose items of clothing. Every year, Hans usually lost articles of outdoor clothing more than once. Agneta’s policy was to buy mega-packs of identical woolly hats and gloves that the whole family could use. Once, Hans had to collect his heavy outdoor shoes from the headquarters of the Security Service. He had been to a meeting at the prime minister’s country residence, forgotten all about his boots and traveled home wearing his best indoor shoes. It took a year before he found the time to collect them.
As the house husband, he could still be effectively absent. When he was preoccupied with his own concerns, the family freezer was easily emptied of ice creams. As happened the time Ola and Anna came home from primary school together and politely asked for an ice cream each. “Sure thing,” Hans said, intent on what he was writing. A little later, the kids turned up again and asked for ice creams. Same reply. This ran on repeat until Hans was told that there were none left. He was baffled.
Hans never felt hungry but if he calculated that an energy boost was needed to stay up reading, he would eat granulated sugar straight from the bag.
He could seem invulnerable because the opinions of others didn’t hurt him. He didn’t really worry about being thought irritating. But if the egocentric side of Hans often caught attention, he also had a powerful, perceptive interest in understanding people’s needs.
At the end of the summer of Hans’s last year of life, Anna and her family were planning to move to the USA. He was already unwell and Anna agonized: should they go or stay? It was hard for her. She thought maybe moving would be best, after all, and sat down with her father to talk about it, listing the advantages and disadvantages of the two options.
His first impulse had been to ask her to stay but, he said, he had decided ignore it. After thinking things over, he told her that they should of course go. They were not to hang about in Sweden, just waiting for him to die.
“Hans has always been instinctively cautious. Looking back, you might have thought him something of a daredevil, but he wasn’t, not at all. He found out what the circumstances were and came to considered conclusions,” Agneta said, while poking at the logs in the open hearth.
One prospect frightened Hans: that of his children or grandchildren somehow being hurt.
“If you ever think that going someplace on a motorbike is a good idea—don’t. Take a taxi and I’ll pay the difference,” he said to Magnus, who went to Beijing for a year’s study after finishing senior school. All motorbike driving was forbidden. “And don’t walk city streets if you’re drunk,” he might say. “You’ll get mugged.”
Hans laid down few rules but didn’t mince words. Wrapping things up wasn’t his style. When Anna wanted to stay the night in a youth hostel—she was in her early teens—he told her to come and have a word with him in his “office.” Actually, his office was a cubbyhole in the cellar, originally intended for a sauna, with just enough room for a desk and a chair. Hans had taken the chair’s armrests off to be able to wriggle into the seat. Crammed into the office, Anna got a lecture on safe sex. Hans added a few words of comfort: if she got pregnant, he and Agneta would obviously take care of the baby so that Anna could finish her education. A baby would be no problem. The serious issue was risking HIV infection.
Anna was flustered. She explained to her dad that they were getting together to watch Monty Python films and eat hot dogs.
When the children were in their teens, Hans did a deal with them. If they needed to be collected from somewhere, they could phone him at any time. He’d drive them. But they must call. In return, the children had to promise to visit Hans in his elderly care home, when the time came.
During Anna’s years in middle and senior school, Hans acted as driver for her and her friends most Saturdays and Sundays, because he was always sober, alert, and ready to go. He had little need of creature comforts and would often be up at all hours, working or playing with a flight simulator program. Besides, he thought it good fun to fit Anna and her girlfriends into all available spaces of the white family Volvo. As their driver, he was quiet and pretended not to be there. He like listening to the girls discussing the evening and their youthful thoughts about life and everything.
After one of Magnus’s far-too-wild nights on the town, Hans picked him up without a word of admonition. Instead, he brought a thermos of coffee.
The door to the Rosling home was always open. It often filled with visitors. The children’s friends came and went, ate with the family, and slept over. They were all quizzed at the table by Hans, whose curiosity was ever active, in his everyday life as well as at work. Young people intrigued him; he wanted to know where they came from and what they thought. His African postgraduate students would be invited round, especially at Christmas and to receptions and birthday parties. They were guests at these parties because, as Hans said, it would interest them to see what Swedish home life was like. In return, he liked to seek out his students when they were working elsewhere in Europe. He would arrange to visit them, often in the summer, when the Rosling family set out on their annual camping holiday.
Hans, Agneta, and the children would roam around the European continent in their white Volvo, packed to the rafters and with a roof box on top. Hans always brought at least one suitcase full of unread academic literature, but often got sucked into a doorstop-size novel. They camped and changed site daily, sleeping in a green tent bought from a classified ad. It ranked as “Eastern Europe’s ugliest,” said Agneta, “the kind of tent everyone had stopped using.”
On skis
* * *
Hans collected countries. When all th
e bigger ones had been ticked off the list, they went for the smaller and the more distant territories—Andorra, Monaco, and so on. They were not allowed to put a tick against a country until they had eaten something there. They carried a gas-fired camping stove but meals were never great performances in the Rosling family. Eating amounted to fuel provision, to keep you going, and bread was as good as anything. Agneta fixed herself cups of instant coffee in the boot of the car—except for the year when Hans forgot the stove, but managed to pack a portable fax machine. “His mind prioritized his paperwork above our family packing,” Agneta commented.
* * *
The grass is still damp after the rain but the garden sofa and chairs are dry. We are sitting together, Agneta and I, in what she calls their “OAP incubator”: a garden folly built from wood and glass. Multicolored paper lanterns hang from the ceiling and a standard lamp, all askew and wrapped in its flex, stands in a corner. Agneta lays the table with colorful tea mugs and a tin of digestive biscuits. Then she puts her glasses on and opens up her laptop to show her large collection of photos.
“Look, here we are in Nacala,” she says, poring over a black-and-white picture. “There must’ve been a power cut because it’s raining but we’re busy lighting a fire outside.”
* * *
In the autumn of 2016, Hans had a full schedule even though he had canceled all his speaking engagements. He was especially preoccupied with the writing of Factfulness, the book he was working on together with Ola and Anna. Sorting his papers and old photographs for his memoirs also took a lot of time. He worked full-time during the periods when he felt well enough, writing passages and always trying to be precise about names and places. Sometimes he became nostalgic, but never self-destructively so. Rooting about in the boxes full of letters and notes in the attic fascinated him. He had saved everything and often talked to his family about how hard it was to recall the order of past events.
He also immersed himself in understanding his type of cancer and would inform Agneta about his latest reading. Hans, as always, grew utterly absorbed in this new subject and sometimes knew more about it than the doctors who looked after him. He and Agneta had decided not to give up, and lived as if there would be a solution—a cure. Agneta concentrated on trying to get him to eat and enjoy himself a little, despite everything.
Throughout his life, he seems to have bothered as little with rest as with food. He would never just lie back on a sofa: he had to learn to do so during his last year. He kept checking the step-counter on his mobile phone until the end. “Better do a few laps now,” he’d say, and do the rounds of the hall and the kitchen.
* * *
Later that evening, we set out in the car to the small fishing village of Abbekås. The idea is to have supper in the harbor pub. As we drive between the wide Skåne plains and the sea, the waves have white crests and the sky is covered in dark clouds. The harbor pub is almost full. Two men are playing guitar and singing songs.
* * *
Agneta and Hans often came here for their evening meal. Their usual small table was discreetly close to a wall and Hans would sit with his back to the room in order not to be recognized. He even refrained from asking the staff about their life histories. This was perhaps the one place where his curiosity was tempered by his wish to be left in peace.
At all other times, Hans would talk to people he met, regardless of whether it was on the beach at Svarte, at the World Economic Forum in Davos or in the Nacala hospital. He was driven by a need to understand how people felt and thought, and how things functioned, and never gave in until he thought he had got it. The will to change followed the reaching of an understanding—that sums up how he saw his life’s task.
* * *
Agneta tells an anecdote from their time in Mozambique. The story began when a couple who lived nearby knocked on their door. The neighbors were poor. Their home, a little farther down the road, was a simple shed with three walls and a roof. The wife had just given birth, and afterward she and her husband kept in touch with Hans and Agneta, who had both advised her to take contraceptive pills, which were supplied free of charge.
Now the couple wanted to let the doctor know that it was not like he thought, because the pills were not free and they couldn’t afford the price. The pharmacist wanted to be paid, they said. Apparently, the Nacala pharmacist was running a private black market in contraceptive pills. Hans immediately started an investigation and it turned out that several members of the hospital staff had heard the rumor—the pharmacist was lining his own pockets at the patients’ expense.
Hans, who had trusted the pharmacist, kick-started a long process of stopping this trade. Hardly any wrongdoing angered him more than someone putting obstacles in the way of public health measures. Agneta remembered when Hans came home one evening, cursing “that crook,” and swore he’d get him locked up. He got there in the end: the police arrested and charged the pharmacist, who was sentenced to prison.
Later, Agneta and Hans laughed at the whole wretched episode, but it could happen that Hans sighed and felt dejected.
Deep down, though, he never gave up.
When the workload was heavy, he urged people around him on with the cry: “Advance into the night!”
When progress seemed hopeless, he often said with a smile: “It’s never too late to give in, so we might as well do it some other time!”
Note
1. Hans Rosling’s Cuban research was published after his death by the family in collaboration with his Cuban co-writers. It appeared in 2017 in a special edition of the Swedish Socialmedicinsk tidskrift (Social Medical Journal) about Hans Rosling. See “Ecological studies in Pinar del Rio Province support a toxico-nutritional etiology of epidemic neuropathy in Cuba” in Socialmedicinsk tidskrift, vol. 94, no. 6, 2017, pp. 731–745.
Appendix: On Cassava
Perhaps Hans Rosling’s most significant discovery in his field of research was his explanation of konzo, an illness with lower-limb paralysis as its main symptom. He showed that the illness arose in regions of severe malnutrition and was caused by a monotonous diet consisting of poorly prepared cassava.
Here, Linley Chiwona-Karltun, who did her doctoral research under Hans Rosling’s supervision, explains aspects of the crop that are crucial for understanding its effects.
* * *
Cassava has many other names, including manioc. It is a drought-tolerant root crop, which grows well in poor soils and is the main source of carbohydrates for people living in sub-Saharan Africa. It is native to South America, where it was first cultivated. Portuguese explorers introduced the plant into West Africa in the sixteenth century and by the twentieth century it had spread widely.
The starchy cassava roots store more carbohydrate per hectare than any other crop. The leaves can be boiled and provide an important source of proteins, vitamins, and minerals.
Cassava is classified as either “sweet-cool” or “bitter”; the bitter variety is poisonous, the sweet one less so, and edible without prior cooking. Bitter cassava contains cyanogenic glucosides in much higher concentration than the sweet type, and these substances become further concentrated in drought conditions. The plants also contain an enzyme that can break down the glucosides and eventually generate free hydrogen cyanide. Bitter cassava must be carefully processed before eating: the enzyme must have time to do its job. Afterward, the hydrogen cyanide must be washed away. In practice, the roots are soaked, grated or fermented, and then either dried in the sun or roasted before cooking. The detoxification process can take between three and fourteen days.
In dry areas such as the Mozambican plateau near Nacala, lack of water makes drying in the sun the only possible method. That form of processing takes several weeks.
At times when cassava is the most important source of energy, the growers normally prefer to cultivate the toxic varieties, because of their bigger yields and high tolerance to poor soils and little or no rain. The poisons are protective against crop theft by monkeys and
men. The growers are usually women, who have learned to distinguish between plants with low and high toxicity, and tend to surround patches of sweet cassava with rows of the bitter type.
During field studies in Malawi, Hans and I studied these women’s knowledge about the different cassava varieties. When we asked them just how bitter and poisonous they were, the woman would show us by pointing at the root to indicate just how much of it you could eat without becoming ill. We were later able to prove in the laboratory that they knew exactly what they were talking about.
Linley Chiwona-Karltun
Also by Hans Rosling
Factfulness
(with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund)
About the Authors
Hans Rosling was a medical doctor, professor of international health and renowned public educator. He was an advisor to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, and co-founded Médecins sans Frontières in Sweden and Gapminder Foundation. His TED talks have been viewed more than 35 million times, and he was listed as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Hans died in 2017, having devoted the last years of his life to writing this memoir and to Factfulness, which was a reading list selection of Barack Obama and Bill Gates. It was a number one global bestseller and has sold more than three million copies worldwide. You can sign up for email updates here.
Fanny Härgestam is a journalist and author based in Stockholm and Paris.
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