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.

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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.