Henning Mankell - I Die, but the Memory Lives on

That evening I thought about what Christine had said. About all those people who still refused to accept that there was such a disease as Aids. And those who did not deny the existence of the disease, yet maintained that there were strange and wondrous ways of curing it. I remembered a sign I'd seen fifteen years before in Zambia, somewhere between Kabwe and Kapiri Mposhi. "I'll repair your bike while my brother cures you of Aids."

I thought about what is happening in South Africa right now. The incidence of rapes has been growing for a long time. Until only a few years ago, most of the rape victims were grown women, or at least teenagers. Not any longer. Since 2001, in some parts of the country, there has been an increase in the number of rapes of children, and most repugnant of all: rapes of infants. This has to do with the widespread, lunatic belief that you can be cured of Aids by having intercourse with a virgin.

How can one fight such mad ideas? People are desperate. How will it be possible to control the Aids epidemic if people continue holding such impossible beliefs?

Christine had talked about her work. About her work as a teacher of the next generation.

She said: "Every time I face my class, it's as if my vision becomes blurred. The same as it is with my father's eyes. Sometimes he complains – although he is not the complaining kind – that everything round about him seems to be duplicated many times over. He sees ten of me, and just as many of my mother. It's the same with me when I'm standing in front of my pupils. Despite the fact that I don't have a problem with my eyesight. Not yet, anyway, although I know that many people with Aids go blind before they die. I see my pupils multiply before my eyes. And I see all the children who have not yet become my pupils. All those who will never learn how to read and write. Being able to read and write means being able to survive. How else can you find out how diseases are spread, how else can you learn how to protect yourself and survive? Of course medicines are important, of course I wish my wages were sufficient for my treatment. But it's just as important that all the children I see as blurred images have access to the knowledge that could save them from an all-too-early death. I want them not to have to write memory books for their own children because they die so young."

That is what Christine said. Several times. She wanted me to remember. That's why she kept repeating it.

Memory books. Writings as death approaches, about death and about life.

This is what this text I am writing is supposed to be about.

I did not go to Uganda so that a girl named Aida would show me the mango plant she tended with such care and concealed under a pile of twigs so that the family's pigs wouldn't gobble it up. I had travelled to Uganda to meet people who were preparing for death by writing little books for their children.

I do not recall the first time I heard about these memory books, but I recognised straight away that they were something I ought to find out more about. These memory books, small exercise books with pasted-in pictures and texts written by people who could barely recite the alphabet, could prove to be the most important documents our time has produced. When all the official reports, minutes, balance sheets, poetry collections, plays, formulae for the control of robots, computer programmes, all the archive materials that represent the foundation on which our life and our history is based – when all that has been forgotten, it could be that these slim volumes, these memoirs left behind by human beings who died too soon, prove to be the most significant documents of our epoch.

Five hundred years from now, what will be left from our time and the ages that preceded us? The Greek tragedies, of course, Shakespeare, and a few other things. Most treasures will be lost, and if not completely forgotten, then kept alive only by a tiny minority. But these memory books could well live on and tell future generations about the terrible affliction that affected our age, that killed millions of people and made millions of children orphans.

There were a lot of questions to be asked. How does a person tell his or her story when he or she cannot even write? I was privy to many different types of story. Memories can be smells, drawings, they do not need to be photographs or written texts. What is the essence that tells others who we are? No doubt the diaries of some people will have something to say about me. But what do the words mean? Apart from the fact that I laugh or cry or smell of garlic?

Storytelling involves words. In olden times stories were handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation, and in many parts of the world that is no doubt still true today. But what is to become of the story when so many links in the human chain disappear? What can children say about their parents if they do not remember anything because they were so young when their parents died? Or to put it another way: how can parents explain who they are to children who are so young that they can't comprehend?

This is what Memory Books are all about.

How does a person tell his story if he cannot write? When he can no longer pass his story by telling it to the next generation? The answer dawned on me. Everybody can tell his or her own story. Words make everything simpler, they are the best method. But it seemed to me that words could be replaced. It must be possible for illiterate people to tell their stories. Smells, imprints, drawings or perhaps pictures taken by cheap disposable cameras. Why not supply everybody who wanted to leave behind a memory book with one of these single-use cameras? It isn't true, of course, that pictures say more than a thousand words, words usually tell more; but a face, a smile, a body, a person standing in front of a house wall or a clump of banana trees could be just as significant.

This is what Memory Books are all about: children must be able to tune into their parents who are no longer alive. Recollections of physical contact buried deep down inside, words and voices that are only vague memories, as something in a dream.

I went to Uganda in order to understand all this, so that I could write about it. In order to be able to tell readers that these Memory Books, or Minnesskrifter, Libros des memorias, Errinerungsbücher, Livres de mémoires, are important documents of our time.

Important. But at the same time, there ought to be no need whatsoever for there to be such books. The ultimate objective of the Memory Books programme has to be a contribution towards the task of ensuring that one day they will be no longer necessary. Nobody should have to die early from Aids. The search for vaccines and cures must all the time be intensified, and existing antiretroviral (ARV) drugs have to be made accessible to all. Nobody should need to write memory books in future.

But millions of these memory books still do need to be written. And it goes without saying that everybody should have the right to do so and receive help where they need it. No orphaned child, whether they live in a village north of Kampala or in some village in China or India, should find themselves growing to adulthood knowing nothing about their parents.

Apart from the fact that they died of Aids.

How many people today in a country like Sweden, my country, know what a terrible disease Aids is? Have we forgotten already the pictures and descriptions produced ten and fifteen years ago when it was not at all sure whether we would be able to control the epidemic? Those who have the disease know, their relatives know and the carers who look after them know. But for most other people Aids is a disease that makes you very thin and fade away, possibly gives you black patches on your face, which leads to the collapse of your immune defence, which leads to persistent infections and eventually perhaps fatal pneumonia. All this is correct. But the fact is that Aids often also involves extreme pain, difficult to alleviate, or very difficult to eliminate altogether.