Two Kenyan women - Wanjiru Koinange and Angela Wachuka - set out in 2017 to do something both ordinary and radical: rebuild neglected libraries in Nairobi.
What began as a small community project quickly revealed the tangled politics of and access to knowledge in a major African city still haunted by its colonial architectures.
Their ongoing work to rehabilitate public libraries is captured in a new film, How to Build a Library, directed and produced by Kenyan filmmakers Maia Lekow and Christopher King.
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The film follows the protagonists as they navigate bureaucracy, gendered expectations and the structural decay of public institutions, while holding fast to a belief that libraries can still be sanctuaries of imagination and civic life.
I am drawn to this film because, as a scholar of African literary cultures, I have been thinking deeply about the infrastructures that sustain reading and writing. This film offers a perspective rarely given the attention it deserves.
Between empire and community
The documentary opens with the pair in a dusty library. This is Nairobi's library network as the film first encounters it: forgotten, underfunded and yet still alive with potential. They eventually quit their corporate jobs to start a non-profit organisation named Book Bunk in 2017, with a mission to transform public libraries in Kenya. For Book Bunk, the project to refurbish and reopen these spaces to the public is an act of restoration and reclamation.
Kenya's public libraries have long been undermined by chronic underfunding, outdated infrastructure and policy neglect, leaving many to function as symbolic spaces rather than living civic institutions. This is a pattern across Africa where libraries have been failed by a lack of sustained public investment and vision.
At the centre of the film stands the McMillan Memorial Library, a vast stone edifice built in 1931 by Lady Lucie McMillan in honour of her husband, Sir Northrup McMillan, one of the city's early colonial settlers. Once the pride of Nairobi, the library's grand neoclassical pillars and reading rooms were designed to mirror the libraries of London. Like so much colonial infrastructure, the building was not meant for everyone. It was initially for the exclusive use of the white colonial settler community, but is now a public institution run by Nairobi County.
The film treats McMillan as both protagonist and antagonist: a physical site of memory and a metaphor for the lingering hierarchies of knowledge. The building is in disrepair, and in some rooms there are masses of broken furniture. The two women's efforts to rehabilitate it - what they call "the ultimate prize" - become entangled in questions of ownership and authority. Who controls public heritage? Who decides what deserves preservation? Their mission takes them from city offices to private boardrooms, confronting a web of interests that guard the library less as a commons than as a monument. The film also includes perspectives from librarians, city officials and the governor of Nairobi, and even captures a visit by King Charles.
What could have been a straightforward tale of civic renewal evolves into a more complex meditation on the politics of cultural labour. How to Build a Library refuses to sentimentalise its subjects. The camera lingers on the exhaustion of Koinange and Wachuka after yet another fruitless meeting, or the frustration of dealing with indifferent officials, the tension between idealism and pragmatism. But through it all, there's an insistence that this kind of work, slow, unglamorous and often invisible, is precisely what sustains a society's intellectual life.
One of the film's most charged sequences unfolds during a visit to the library, where Koinange and Wachuka engage the librarians in a discussion about the collection and its reliance on the Dewey Decimal System. What begins as a thoughtful critique of how African knowledge is misclassified, marginalised or rendered invisible within colonial cataloguing structures gradually becomes tense. The librarians perceive this as an undermining of their expertise. The scene resists easy resolution. In this moment, the library becomes a site of friction, revealing how deeply colonial knowledge systems remain embedded, even as they are questioned.
Politics of care
Visually, the documentary is striking for its attention to texture and detail. The camera lingers on decaying staircases, on fingers tracing dusty book spines, on shafts of light cutting through broken windows. These are not merely aesthetic gestures; they register the passage of time, the erosion of care and the persistence of those who refuse to give up on the public sphere. The filmmakers use these images to pose a broader question: what happens to a city when its libraries fall into disrepair?
Throughout the film, the act of rebuilding emerges as a metaphor for a larger cultural project. In repairing shelves and repainting walls, the women are also trying to repair the idea of the library itself as a civic institution, as a symbol of collective memory, as a space where knowledge might circulate freely again. Their work gestures toward a radical politics of care: an understanding that maintenance, too, can be revolutionary.
There is a subtle feminist thread running through How to Build a Library. The protagonists' labour, emotional, logistical and physical, contrasts sharply with the masculinised power structures they must navigate mostly run by men. Their insistence on dialogue, collaboration and community foregrounds a different mode of leadership, one rooted not in authority but in empathy. In this sense, the film also challenges how cultural infrastructure is imagined and sustained: who builds it, who funds it, who is allowed to dream through it.
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By its conclusion, How to Build a Library does not offer easy closure. The McMillan remains in limbo, its future uncertain. Yet the film resists despair. Instead, it finds meaning in the process itself, in the act of showing up, of cleaning, of painting, of listening. It suggests that building a library is not merely about erecting walls or cataloguing books; it is about creating the conditions for dialogue, for the slow and ongoing work of citizenship.
Libraries matter
The verdict, if one is needed, is not triumph but endurance. In an age when attention spans have dwindled and public culture is increasingly privatised, the film insists that libraries still matter. They remain among the few truly democratic spaces where people can gather without having to buy or belong. To build a library, the film suggests, is to build a future, one in which knowledge, however precariously, remains a shared inheritance.
How to Build a Library is screening at select cinemas in Nairobi and at film festivals worldwide.
Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Assistant Professor, Harvard University
