Two 2025 Lindsay Fellows on Postcolonial Livelihoods in East and West Africa
Two student recipients of the MacMillan Center’s Lindsay Fellowship for Research in Africa, Rita Nwanze and Charlotte Bednarski, showcased their research about evolving approaches to waste management, childcare, and democracy with Yale students and faculty. Their talks, moderated by religious studies scholar Paul Essah, explored the ramifications of African postcolonial transitions in politics and daily life.
The MacMillan Center’s Council on African Studies offers a Master’s in African Studies, and Rita Nwanze, a student in the M.A. program, centered her talk on the causes and consequences of waste management policies in Ghana and Kenya’s capital cities.
“Waste is a part of life, everything ends up unwanted at some point or another.”
Growing up in Ghana, she witnessed the country's inadequacies in waste management firsthand. Notions of what to do with waste have evolved throughout the histories of Nairobi, Kenya, and Accra, Ghana.
Nwanze’s oral interviews in both cities explored precolonial waste management practices. Through intentional composting, these populations nourished marine and pastoral life, showing a deep understanding of natural circularities.
However, her archival research in both cities documents colonial narratives which framed Africans and their waste management systems as primitive. British colonists exerted strong state control over African people, reorganizing social, political, and economic practices. New extractive commerce models clashed with prior waste disposal methods.
A sanitary police force prohibited visible waste, so waste heaps accumulated in resident backyards. However, prohibitions on ash dispersal impeded routine burnings of these waste heaps, leading to pestilence and malaria outbreaks.
Various solutions to the issue, as borrowed from neighboring colonies, yielded mixed results due to local resistance, growing quantities of non-organic waste, and issues locating suitable waste sites. Nwanze’s future research will focus more on waste workers’ lives and emerging strategies for waste management.
Ph.D. student Charlotte Bednarski discussed Malian democracy under a transitional government and Ugandan child welfare systems.
Bednarski, who completed an M.A. in African Studies at Yale in 2022, began by exploring Malian politics and corruption following a 2020 coup. She framed democracy as a “set of values and norms, not just American structures and rules.”
She explored how core tenets of democracy, such as inclusivity, participation, and peaceful transitions, may be threatened or reimagined under Mali’s current political structure. Bednarski’s research is partially based on her conversations with a former prime minister who was recently jailed for expressing solidarity with political prisoners online.
The second part of Bednarski’s talk examined childcare practices for orphaned children in Uganda. She drew from her time volunteering for the international non-profit, Love Without Boundaries. The organization takes a holistic approach to rehoming children with suitable family members, foster homes, and adoptive families.
As Bednarski explained, organizations like these replace older models of caring for vulnerable children. Previous generations often resolved these issues within their original communities, without intermediary efforts by the government or independent organizations. Bednarski explored challenges in balancing fundraising efforts with children’s well-being, suggesting that non-profit communications efforts often oversimplify deeply complex processes and come at a cost to children’s well-being.
Though the subject matter of the students’ research differed, both examined shifting systems of power and precolonial practices to contextualize current realities, laying groundwork for culturally informed solutions.
The Lindsay Fellowship for Research in Africa provides grants to graduate and professional students for summer research that enhances the Yale community's understanding of Africa. Students must apply through the Yale Student Grants & Fellowships database.
Submissions for the summer of 2026 open on January 3, 2026, and close on March 4, 2026. Application questions may be directed to the Council’s Program director, Cristin Siebert.
Written by Michelle Foley, a Woodbridge Fellow at the MacMillan Center.