Excess Baggage - 16/01/2010

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John McCarthy talks to Christopher Alexander about carpet weaving in Uzbekistan, to Deborah Moggach about women's roles in Ghana and Clive Harber about being an academic in Africa.

John McCarthy meets Christopher Aslan Alexander, who ran a carpet weaving workshop in Khiva in Uzbekistan to revive traditional skills and provide work and a focus for local women. He reveals a country that is a confusion of Mohammedism, Marxism and modernism.

John also talks to author Deborah Moggach, who visited Ghana to find out about the role of women and girls in society there and discovered a melting pot of the ancient and the modern.

And Professor Clive Harber has been visiting Africa for nearly 40 years as an academic specialising in education. He tells John about African academic life, how the school systems there treat girls in particular and about some of the spectacular wildlife parks he has been to over the years.