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.

In Sweden, highly qualified and devoted care is available for as long as it is needed. About ten years ago so-called anti-retroviral drugs began to appear. It was possible to get to grips with HIV, because ARVs delay the onset of Aids. People infected could start to hope that they might be able to live a long life even so. But in a poor country in Africa, where medical care is already primitive? They have to cope with a constant lack of resources, everything from clean sheets to the most advanced medication. And in such countries, the squeeze on what care and assistance may be made available is all the time increasing. What are the prospects there?

To suffer from Aids in Sweden and to suffer from Aids in a country like Uganda are two entirely different things. The gulf between the two peoples is as between the rich and the poor. In all areas. Even when it comes to nursing. Even when it comes to pain.

If you happen to be born in a poor country, the risk of being forced to suffer unimaginable pain is infinitely greater than in a country like Sweden. In a poor country there is a devastating relative lack of resources, as also the medical capacity to alleviate pain. This is incredibly cruel. If you are doomed to die, the agony you are condemned to endure should not depend on where you happen to be born.

The day that Christine showed me the memory book she had written for Aida, Aida herself took me secretly to show me her mango plant. The two things were connected, of course, what Christine did and what Aida did. But it was not a prearranged plan. Plans often emerge of their own accord when it comes to death and the sorrow that is in store. Every time the memory book was mentioned, Aida sought consolation in her mango plant. In order to endure the prospect of death she had to make an invocation to life.

The little memory books follow a basic template.^* An outline is provided on pre-printed pages. There is a simple logic in the headings printed on the various pages. But all the memory books I read in Uganda were original. No two were alike.

* A sample memory book is printed at the end of this volume.

People choose their own roads along which to travel. The most important thing is not to follow the manual but to tell about the very special things that only the writer has experienced. They don't need to be told about that. People think like that of their own accord. Everybody knows what is special about themselves, even if most people are modest enough to think they are no more than ordinary. But an ordinary person is always a person with unique and surprising experiences.

I spent a large part of one of the evenings I was in Uganda thinking about what precisely the memory of a person is. I thought about myself, of course. What do I want people to remember about me? What would I prefer to have suppressed? Do I have a number of secrets that I shall take with me to the grave? How can I shape other people's recollections of me?

It is an impossible task. I can hardly control what anyone else chooses to remember about me. I can only have a vague idea of what sort of an impression I have made. To some extent I can anticipate reactions to what I have written, what I have done in the theatre. But what about the memory of me as an individual? The child who was born in St Göran's Hospital in Stockholm at four o'clock in the morning of February 3, 1948?

I can guess that people's memories will vary. Some will remember me as a rather gloomy, possibly even melancholy person who needs to be left in peace and who can flare up if he's disturbed. Others will remember me as the opposite, a decent, cheerful person who will hardly be the last name to spring to mind when drawing up a guest list for a party.