Afterword
by Fanny Härgestam

“Hans Rosling is going to write a book. Would you like to give him a hand?”

The question was put to me by the publisher at Natur & Kultur, Richard Herold, who phoned me one evening in December 2016. I took the call standing on a metro platform. The book was not to be just about Hans’s work, as with Factfulness, the book they had already started on. Instead, it would tell the story of his life. The project was urgent, Richard said, explaining that Hans was seriously ill with cancer and might not have much time left. The writing had to be done at speed.

It soon became clear that Hans had already begun a memoir. It was a text fragment he had written during the last few months, and it needed reworking and extending.

A couple of weeks later, Richard and I went to Uppsala and stood waiting outside Hans and Agneta’s door. We had brought a bag of muffins for this first encounter. Maybe the only one. When we pressed the doorbell, I felt nervous. What to expect? Is he bedridden? Will he be able to speak?

Agneta opened the door and then Hans bustled in, smiling delightedly. He had no problem talking, that much was instantly obvious. We stood inspecting the different objects in the hall for quite a while as Hans enthusiastically told us their stories, one by one.

Among other things, there was a huge, red wooden clock placed inside a huge, red wooden crib next to two red wooden chairs. The whole arrangement, which took up a lot of space, was an artwork awarded to Hans. The hall was the only space where it would fit.

A map on the wall showed Agneta’s family farm in Vassunda, now turned into a golf course. “You know where it is, don’t you?” he asked and looked at me.

It was like a little test and it amused Hans. I admitted that my grasp of the local geography of Uppsala County was pretty feeble, but he probably didn’t hear me because he was already on his way into the sitting room while telling us about how he and Agneta had just celebrated fifty years together as a couple.

“If you are secure in a relationship you are set free to move in space and thought,” he said.

When they were fourteen, Agneta and Hans were in the same class at school. One of their teachers had pointed out that, statistically, some people in the class would get married to each other. Agneta remembers scanning her classmates and thinking: “Not me, at any rate.” Just a couple of years later, Agneta and Hans met at a New Year celebration—an anything-but-sober party at the Temperance Society in Uppsala. They have been partners ever since.

Once we were all in the sitting room, Agneta served coffee while Hans handed us copies of his CV, neatly prepared on two sheets of paper stapled together. He clearly wasn’t very willing to speak about his illness and preferred the subject of “the world.”

He had pulled out the dining table near the seating area to have his laptop close at hand.

“Watch out, lots of cables everywhere,” he said as he ferreted about under the table with the remote in one hand.

As dusk gathered around Uppsala, he spoke to the graphs of child mortality, gesticulating in front of the screen with his thin arms. Before I could follow how he did it, the numbers and the graphs were turning into anecdotes. After filling our coffee cups, Hans told us about his time as a young medic working in a hospital in Mozambique in the 1970s. Richard and I listened in silence. He spoke in particular about the hard decisions he had faced and described having to cut unborn babies into pieces to be able to extract them and save the mother’s life. It was extreme poverty that created such impossible dilemmas. He said that working in low-income countries had often frustrated him to the point that he feared he’d go mad. His years of research in Africa had been tough and his workload had sometimes coincided with personal tragedies affecting him and his family. He spoke of seeing mothers lose their children and knowing the pain they suffered because he had felt it, too, when he and Agneta lost their daughter.

Agneta added to the narrative now and then. It had grown dark outside when the words began to flow more slowly. Suddenly, his voice broke. Tears ran down his cheeks. Agneta wept with him. They were controlled and quiet, sitting closely together on the sofa.

“It has been a long time since either of us talked about this,” Hans said.

I got my first email from Hans later that evening. He said he felt somehow re-ignited despite his illness. From then onward, we were in touch by email or phone practically every day. If I went traveling, I took the tape deck and the tapes of our conversations. I always recorded our conversations.

He sent a photo of himself one afternoon with the caption “Great pose if one wants to come across as fit”: he had been snapped on a cross-country skiing trek.

Hans seemed healthy and alert at our meetings, which often lasted for hours. Meeting to talk had become part of our routine. We might start in the morning, carry on until a midday break and then speak all afternoon. Hans always sounded eager when he took a call.

“We’ll start from the beginning,” he often said, when realizing that he had shot off into a discourse that had nothing whatever to do with our main subject.

While Hans was writing new parts of his memoirs, I worked on the existing text to find passages I would like to reshape or rewrite in greater depth. I always asked him what he thought. He was eager for me to understand him and his background but he also wanted to tell me about how he saw the world.

“It will be a kind of crash course in world development for you, Fanny,” he used to say. I imagined him smiling contentedly on the other end of the phone as I asked him follow-up questions about vaccine availability or the links between freedom of expression and economic development.

We discussed the direction of the book many times and at great length. He tended to look for conclusions and argued like the born pedagogue he was, asking questions like: “What will the reader learn by reading this chapter?” For my part, I tried all the time to find out about his past experiences, and how Hans had been affected personally by different events; but it could be tricky to make him focus on a particular moment.

When he did open up, however, he did so unguardedly, without reservations. He had wept spontaneously that first day we met in Uppsala, just as he later could become emotional when recalling other things that had happened in his past and people he had met.

Hans worried that his own life and his thoughts on what his social background signified would not add up to anything of sufficient interest. He also worried about time being too short.

“There are so many stories I’d like to tell,” he often said.

I tried in vain to persuade him that his first concern was groundless. As for the second one, I shared it—time was short.

We didn’t make it.

“I’ll get back to you when I’m in a fit state to talk again,” he wrote in his last text message to me. He died three days later.

I was able to complete his memoirs mainly because of the hours of interviews with Hans that I had taped in January and early February 2017. I read a lot by Hans’s own hand, all the articles, lecture notes and interview transcripts. To complete the narrative and fill in details of his accounts, I carried out additional interviews with people who knew Hans professionally as well as privately.

Talking with Agneta was a special part of my preparations for the book. She illustrated her stories by showing me photos from their travels and jobs as well as their day-to-day life together. Hans had been a father and a spouse, sides of him that I learned little about from him, but which, after his death, emerged from the stories told by Agneta and their children.

Agneta and I spent a few days together in the southern province of Skåne in the summer of 2017. We went down to the beach, with its strong winds and warm sand, wrapped in the striped terry-gowns I had seen hung on the wall of the upstairs landing in the small, white-rendered house that had been passed on to Agneta. In the summers, generations of her family have been coming to stay in this traditional cottage.

The summers are often cool but, regardless, Agneta walks every morning along the narrow path to the sea and—if the water is at least 55 degrees—goes for a swim. She and Hans came here often and, during their last few years together, talked about moving in for good. Hans enjoyed the seaside but, unlike Agneta, wasn’t too keen on getting into the water. He walked to the beach fully dressed, in shirt, trousers, socks, and sandals. This was his favorite activity, to walk along the beach where the sea meets the sand.

“Still, I got him to swim as far as the jetty over there,” Agneta said, pointing at a small jetty, which one could dive from, a bit farther along.

Nearby, a stream wound its way to the sea, making loops in the sand. Small children were playing in the shallow pools.

Every summer, Hans would set to work to dam the stream. He looked forward to his project, which had no purpose other than keeping him amused. His goal was to change the direction of the stream by building a dam with boulders and sand shoveled on at top speed. He recruited family and strangers alike as stone-carrying slaves. His own task was to plan the new estuary and he would be very pleased if the wind was helpful. On really good days, the wind changed direction so that the stream shifted position naturally.

Hans had chemotherapy treatment during his last summer but felt reasonably well: a little more breathless than usual but happy to go swimming now and then. The two of them had agreed to live as normally as possible, taking daily walks and starting the day with cheese sandwiches for breakfast in the untamed garden.

Indoors, there was a desk in every room, ready for Hans to settle down. He usually preferred to write upstairs in a room with a view over the apple trees.

“He had realized the time to sum up had come. To focus on what had been, rather than what the future might bring,” Agneta said.

It was something he had not given himself time to do before. The process of “summing up” absorbed him, but Agneta saw to it that he left his desk to move about or come downstairs for meals. If she hadn’t strong-armed him, he would have done neither.

“He wasn’t always the easiest man to coach,” Agneta said with a smile. She coached him, yes, but she drove herself, too. “I never agreed just to accompany Hans on his travels. My condition was that I would be part of the plan in my own right.”

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.”

Hans collected countries. When all the 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!”