ATL

Compare and contrast

Children's author Gill Harvey writes about her experiences of education both in the UK and in Africa

I sit writing this in the city of Bissau, capital of Guinea-Bissau on the west coast of Africa. Drifting through the window comes the ubiquitous sound of a woman pounding rice in her courtyard; the occasional bleat of a goat, the squeal of a pig, the crow of a cockerel; children calling; and now, just above it all, the call of a muezzin from a nearby mosque. This is apt, because my reflections are about the increasing contrast between the audience I write for and the world in which I now live.

I write mainly for children, and I've done so on a freelance basis for about ten years. In that time, two things have occurred. First, I've come to spend more time in Africa, researching my ideas; and second, as my fiction career evolves, I spend more time meeting the UK schoolchildren who read my books.

In August 2009, for example, I returned from Guinea-Bissau to attend the Edinburgh Book Festival. I had been exploring life deep in the primary forests, where villagers share their environment with chimpanzees and are barely touched by the cash economy; homemade soap, palm oil and grass baskets are exchanged with other villages for vegetables, rice and fish.

There are plenty of children, and a village school, but in the time that I spent there I didn't see a single book. At Edinburgh, where my event focused on my new series of novels set in ancient Egypt, The Egyptian chronicles, I found an audience of well-read children whose knowledge and enthusiasm were little short of astonishing.

Then it was back to Bissau and the realities of living in the sixth poorest country in the world. In the capital, education is highly valued, but doesn't come easily. It never fails to strike me (elsewhere in Africa, as well as here) that no one has the privilege of learning in their mother tongue, for colonial languages still dominate. Moreover, resources are virtually nil.

During the last 20 years, no minister of education has lasted more than a year, many just a few months. The state's schools are so bad that even the poorest try to find the fees demanded by marginally better establishments. And then, for the lucky few who get through the system and receive a grant to study abroad, there is the prospect of leaving friends and family behind for years, with no funds for a quick visit home.

I returned to the UK in October for the Cheltenham Literary Festival, and to visit a number of schools. More wonderful, bright-eyed children, playing my quiz game 'Cobras and vipers', with wildly competitive zeal and a lot of laughter. I enjoyed these events hugely, but now in Bissau once more, I am still trying to deal with the culture shock — in both directions.

The strongest feeling is an intense awareness of Western privilege. No one would say that the UK education system is perfect, but there is so much about it that is good. British children, even in the toughest schools, are receiving vast resources compared to their African counterparts. Even harder is the realisation that many Africans are very much aware of it.

In the other direction, though, I am slowly learning something more subtle. At first I deplored the fact that African children don't sit around with story books; but now I can feel how the patterns and rhythms of life are different in Africa. Children grow up close to the nub of survival, with a rich sense of interdependence. And that reliance on each other is what carries people through, far more than the level of their schooling. I wish they had some of the things that I was given, but I'd like some of what they've got, too.

Gill Harvey's new novels The sacred scarab and The deathstalker are out in February and April, published by Bloomsbury

Illustration (c) Phil Wrigglesworth