Makanga

Town in Democratic Republic of the Congo.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
How I Learned to Understand the World	Hans Rosling	turning point	Rosling’s team sets up a lab hut with a generator and centrifuge in the village to take blood samples for konzo research.

How I Learned to Understand the World — Hans Rosling

Source: How I Learned to Understand the World · Readwise highlight

The most densely populated and most distant of the villages was a place called Makanga and it was said to be particularly afflicted by konzo, with many paralyzed children.

• Role: turning point
• In the book: Rosling’s team sets up a lab hut with a generator and centrifuge in the village to take blood samples for konzo research. Rumours of blood-stealing bring a crowd with machetes, until a village woman argues for research by pointing to measles vaccines and volunteers her own blood. He says she saved his life.
• Why it matters: The book’s most dramatic field scene; it shows the ‘chain of trust’ and sets up his later turn to the economics behind konzo. Elsewhere it would lose its specific village politics of elder, sardines and colonial blood sampling.