How I Learned to Understand the World Read online

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  Foreword

  by Agneta Rosling

  After more than fifty years of friendship and marriage, three children and eight grandchildren, Hans left me to a severe silence. Through this book his voice can be heard again.

  Hans started writing about his life several years ago. He wanted to use his own family experience to tell the story of social development: to point out the similarities between the lives of people from his grandparents’ generation, born in Sweden over one hundred years ago, and the lives of people in many countries today, far away from modern-day Sweden both in kilometers and in their living conditions. He wanted to share the stories that had changed or strengthened his vision of what was important in life: of what has to be changed in the world to give us all a sustainable future.

  Hans always emphasized that he wasn’t being altruistic when he emphasized the need for equality to avoid conflict and war, but selfish. He wanted a world without war for himself, his family and everyone else. Neither was he an optimist, because he never thought the changes he was talking about would be easy to achieve. He called himself a “possibilist” and always strived to convince his audience that it was possible to make the world a place where everyone had a fair chance of living a life on reasonable terms.

  Cross-country running was a favorite sport, and Hans always liked to use a map to know where he was and a compass to find the way. This illustrates his way of analyzing any situation. You can find the right direction and reach your goal only if you know where you are now and how things are around you. The importance of developing critical thinking habits to understand global development is covered in greater depth in the book Hans wrote with our son Ola Rosling and daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Factfulness.

  This book, How I Learned to Understand the World, tells Hans’s own story, from childhood through to his adult life and career. It was first published in Swedish the year Hans passed away. In this edition, some of the stories are left out, as we thought these would only be interesting in the Swedish context or because they had already been told in Factfulness. I am very pleased that English-language readers will be able to read Hans’s memoir in this edited form.

  Hans’s legacy is maintained and developed by the Gapminder Foundation and, in various ways, by a number of universities both in Sweden and elsewhere. Through the Gapminder Foundation, Ola and Anna are continuing their creative work of promoting a fact-based worldview that is easy to understand. At this time, with the Covid-19 pandemic threatening to increase poverty and hunger in many low-income countries, Hans would have been more committed than ever to this work. I am satisfied to know that his voice is still being heard, and that so many people have learned the lessons he was trying to teach and taken his experience to heart.

  Hans would have loved to test your knowledge.

  The importance of a fact-based understanding of the world is more pressing than ever.

  Agneta Rosling

  Uppsala, April 2020

  Introduction

  On February 5, 2016, I spoke to my doctor on the phone. What he said meant that writing this book became a priority. I had been prepared for bad news, and it was. The diagnosis was pancreatic cancer.

  Our talk that Friday afternoon only confirmed what had gradually become obvious to me during the last few days of undergoing medical investigations. The prognosis was bad. I had approximately one year left to live.

  I spent most of that evening in tears. I was lucky to have Agneta, my wife, who had been my lovely young girlfriend and then became my partner for life when we got married in 1972. Through the comfort she offered me and the support of our children and friends, I was able to adjust to this new reality. I would not die in the coming month. Terminal illness or not, life would go on. And I would be around to enjoy life during the spring and summer at least.

  Cancer made the structure of my daily life unpredictable and my work schedule had to change. Just a few days after learning of my illness, I canceled all my lecture engagements and also my participation in film and TV projects. It was sad but I had no choice. Besides, I had specific plans, which helped me cope with these dramatic measures. One item on my to-do list moved to the top: complete the book that I had planned to write jointly with my son, Ola, and his wife, Anna. We had agreed on the title: Factfulness. Over the last eighteen years, the three of us had been working together in public education and founded a not-for-profit venture called Gapminder.

  In the autumn of 2015, Anna and Ola had formulated the concept behind the book as well as its title. We had decided to set aside the following year for writing it, in parallel with our work for Gapminder. After my cancer diagnosis I was in even more of a hurry.

  I quickly realized that there was enough material for two books. While Factfulness is about the reasons why people find development on a global scale so hard to grasp, this book is about me and how I reached that understanding.

  In other words, this is a memoir. Unlike Factfulness, it is very short on numbers. Instead, I tell stories about meeting people who opened my eyes, and made me step back and think again.

  Hans Rosling

  Uppsala, January 2017

  1

  From Illiteracy to Academic Excellence

  When my father came home from work in the evening, he always smelled of coffee. He worked in the roasting shed at Lindvalls Kaffe in Uppsala. This is how I came to love the scent of coffee long before I began to drink it. I often watched out for Pappa coming home from work, waiting outside as he cycled along the street. He would jump off his bike and hug me and then I’d ask him the same question every time: “Did you find anything today?”

  When the sacks of green coffee beans arrived for roasting, the beans were tipped out onto a conveyor belt and, first of all, screened by a powerful magnet. The idea was to remove any metal objects that might have ended up in the sack during the drying and packing process. Pappa would bring these things home to me and tell me a story about every one of them. These stories were thrilling.

  Sometimes he brought a coin. “Look, this is from Brazil,” he might say. “Brazil produces more coffee than anywhere else.”

  My father would let me sit on his lap, open the world atlas in front of us and begin telling the story: “It’s a large country and very hot. This coin turned up inside a sack from Santos,” he would explain, pointing at the Brazilian port city.

  He would describe the working men and women, links in the chain that ended with people in Sweden sipping their coffee. Early on, I realized the coffee pickers got the poorest pay.

  Or it might be a coin from Guatemala. “In Guatemala, white Europeans own the coffee plantations. The locals, who were the first to settle in the country, only get the low-paid jobs. Like picking coffee berries.”

  I remember especially well the time he brought home a copper coin, a 5-cent piece from Brit
ish East Africa—now Kenya—with a hole in the middle.

  “I think a man would carry his coins by threading a leather strap through the holes and tying the strap around his neck. While he was spreading the coffee beans to dry on the sandy ground before putting them in the sack, perhaps the necklace broke. He picked up as many coins as he could but missed this one. It ended up among the beans and now it belongs to you.”

  To this day, I have kept the coins my father gave me in a wooden box. The East African coin led him to explain to me about colonialism. At the age of eight, I learned about the Mau-Mau freedom army and its demand for Kenyan independence.

  My father’s stories convinced me that, to him, the Latin American and African people who picked, dried and packed coffee were his colleagues. And I have no doubt at all that my powerful longing to understand the world began with Pappa telling me about the coins in the coffee sacks and showing me all those countries in the atlas. This longing grew into a lifelong passion and, later, into what I saw as my most important professional calling.

  In retrospect, I realize that my father saw the worldwide rebellions against colonialism in the same way as the European struggle against Nazism. During our long weekend walks in the forest, he would talk in detail about the history of the Second World War.

  * * *

  Politically, my parents were no extremists. Rather the opposite; they were almost boringly ordinary. My father admired everyone who fought for justice and freedom but both of them objected just as much to the far left as to the far right.

  I grew up without a religion but with a strong set of values from my parents: “Whether people do or don’t believe in God isn’t important, what counts is how they treat their fellow men.” And: “Some people are church-goers, others take walks in the forest and enjoy nature.”

  Skiing with Dad

  We had a small wireless set in a varnished wooden case. It stood on the String shelf above the kitchen table. During supper, we would always listen to the news from Sveriges Radio, the national broadcaster. My parents’ views mattered to me as a boy, more than the actual news stories. Mamma usually commented on the Swedish news, while Pappa focused on news from abroad and often responded strongly, pausing his meal and sitting bolt upright as he listened, shushing me and Mamma. Afterward, we would talk for a long time about what we had heard.

  * * *

  Once, I nearly drowned in the open drain running in front of my grandparents’ home. It is my earliest memory. I was just four years old and had slipped out of the garden and started to wander between the fence and the drainage channel. The channel brimmed with wastewater, a mixture of last night’s rainfall and stinking sewage from neighboring homes.

  Something caught my attention down there in the muck. I was curious and climbed into the drain to see better. Then I slipped. The sloping sides offered no handholds. I couldn’t breathe. Everything was dark. Panicking, I tried to twist but only sank deeper into the sludge.

  My nineteen-year-old aunt, who had come to look for me, spotted my kicking feet and hauled me out. When my grandma Berta took over and carried me into the kitchen, my relief was huge: to this day I still vividly remember the feeling. Grandma had been heating water on the wood-fired kitchen stove, preparing to do the dishes. Now she poured the warm water into the tin bath instead. She tested the temperature with her elbow while I undressed, then helped me into it and washed me from top to toe with a soft sponge and plenty of soap. Soon I was playing happily with the sponge. It was only many years later that I realized quite how close I had been to death.

  Even then, in 1952, there was no deep drainage system in the Eriksberg area of Uppsala, where many factory workers, including my paternal grandparents, had their home. At the age of four, I had been sent to stay with my grandparents because my mother had come down with tuberculosis and been admitted to the hospital. My father visited my mother every evening after work and could only be with me on Sundays. Grandma, who had brought up seven children of her own, looked after me all week. Her youngest two were nineteen and twenty-three years old, and still living at home when I became Grandma’s eighth child.

  Both my paternal grandparents had been born and bred in the countryside but had eventually joined the growing urban workforce. My grandfather worked in the same Uppsala brickworks, Uppsala-Ekeby, his entire adult life. He was a kind, hardworking man who loved his wife and showed it. He and his sons had built their wooden two-story house in the evenings after work and in any other spare moment. It was his pride and joy. Thanks to an in-house mortgage plan run by the brickworks, he had been able to buy a wooded plot at the edge of the city. It became part of a housing area for factory workers.

  The tall pines on the site had provided most of the construction material for Grandpa Gustav’s house. He spent one summer felling the pines and sawing them into planks using a two-handed timber saw, a period of very hard labor that he remembered for the rest of his life.

  Grandpa had wanted the house to be as modern as he could possibly afford but, like all working-class housing, the standard of hygiene was poor. The tap above the sink in the corner of the kitchen was the only source of running water. The sink was also where we emptied our chamber pots from the bedroom, including my small potty. The ditches that wound their way along the area’s dirt roads were filthy, unhealthy open drains. Grandma kept the house and garden clean and tidy but, in the summers, the stench from the ditches was everywhere. When, later in life, I traveled to many corners of the world, the slum smell of open drains always reminded me of my summers with my grandparents.

  My parents, like my grandparents, were also poor. Despite being short of money, they and their families were not seen as deprived. During my childhood and youth, household incomes and health improved steadily throughout Sweden. The health service, part of an expanding welfare state, meant that new medicines were available free of charge. My mother’s tuberculosis was cured. Deaths due to infectious diseases declined sharply and accidents replaced infections as the most common cause of death in childhood. Standing pools of water near homes, like the ditch I fell into, could be fatal for my generation of Swedish children.

  * * *

  I was only a teenager when I became fascinated by the challenge of truly understanding how people lead their lives. I began to ask my mother’s and father’s parents detailed questions about their living conditions. Nothing has proved more helpful for my understanding of our modern world than examining the parallels between our world today and the worlds of my relatives in earlier generations.

  Grandma Berta told me about how she and Grandpa Gustav, as newlyweds in 1915, had moved into their first home, a rented house in the countryside near Uppsala. It had a wooden floor but only one room and a kitchen. Their simple source of light was a paraffin lamp and Grandma had to fetch water from a nearby well. After twelve years and five childbirths, they could finally move closer to where Gustav worked, but their second home was also very small—a mere twenty-four square meters—and it, too, only had one room and a kitchen. However, it was supplied with electricity and piped water. Berta gave birth to their sixth child during the three years they lived there. She and Gustav and two of the children slept in the kitchen and the other four shared the single room. Grandma Berta would speak warmly about the huge difference electric light had made to their lives. It affected everything, including how she ran the household and how the children did their homework. Importantly, if someone fell ill during the hours of darkness, the light could be switched on. Her praise of electricity was unstinting.

  The family had to use outdoor latrines—holes in the ground—in their first two homes. In 1930, when they moved into the house Grandpa had built, an indoor latrine had been dug in the cellar. The new house had four rooms, all wired for electric light. Even by 1952, though, when I was staying with my grandparents, Grandma used the wood-fired stove for cooking, heating water for washing and laundry, and so on. That year, they got their first telephone.

  Grandpa had also in
stalled a tap in the cellar and placed two large cement sinks next to it. My grandma could stay indoors to wash her large family’s clothes and bedlinen by hand, rather than lugging it all to a nearby stream and back. Even so, doing the laundry remained a tough, boring, and time-consuming job. Grandma kept an eye on the new labor-saving inventions that industrialization came up with and one day her dream became real: the “magic” washing machine.

  My father was Berta’s second child—actually, her third-born. Her first child was born in a hospital but the baby died. Pappa finished his six years of schooling at the age of fourteen. He got a job as a bricklayer’s apprentice at the local brickworks—nowadays, it would be classed as child labor, and the older men often mistreated the lads. Still, in those days, young men in growing families made a critical contribution to the household income.

  For my father, the very worst thing about his job was neither the poor conditions nor the low wages but the fact that he lost it when he was seventeen. For him, being unemployed was utterly shameful, even though it was a fate he shared with many others during the economic crisis of the 1930s. To be useful, he mended the neighbors’ shoes.

  On the morning of April 9, 1940, the German army invaded Norway and Denmark. My father was called up to fight just a few hours after the news was broadcast. The next day, he was handed a rifle and posted to Landskrona, a harbor town in the straits between Denmark and Sweden. The conscripts were ordered to dig trenches to defend Sweden against the Germans.

  My father remained in the army throughout the Second World War and was sent to defend in turn our borders with Denmark, Norway, and Finland. He often spoke of how lucky it was that he was never attacked—during his army years, he hadn’t even heard a shot fired in anger.