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?