Maia Lekow and Christopher King’s Sundance-Selected Documentary Informs on How to Build a Library

When the camera pans towards Shiro Koinange, a novelist, and Angel Wachuka, a publisher, in Maia Lekow and Christopher King’s documentary How To Build A Library, they are standing outside the McMillan Memorial Library giving direction, via a phone call, to someone we don’t meet. After the call, Shiro says, “That’s the problem. Everybody should know where the library is.” They laugh about it and the documentary starts earnestly. As fleeting as this statement is, it summarizes one of what Shiro and Wachuka and by extension the documentary tackles: The gradual dissolution of the place of the library in public consciousness. Built in 1931 by a British-American settler family, the McMillian Memorial Library is currently in ruins. And, the documentary film which screened at the World Cinema Documentary Competition section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival follows the daily effort of the duo, from 2018 to 2024, in restoring the library whilst also capturing the hollow words of Kenyan government officials.

In 2018, Shiro and Wachuka decided to quit their job in order to restore a debilitated colonial-era library situated in bustling downtown Nairobi. Alarmed, as readers and pursuers of knowledge, about the crumbling state of the library, they lobbied Nairobi County Government to take over the colonial library and two(Makadara and Kaloleni library) others sprinting into oblivion. Lekow and King’s How To Build a Library is the co-director’s effort of contributing to Shiro and Wachuka’s effort.

Written by King, Maia and Ricardo Acosta, How to Build a Library also serves as a critique of colonialism and its legacies. The library spaces, despite Kenya’s independence from colonial rule, still hold images, ceramic arts and relics of its colonial past. Despite the ladies’ rejection of these colonial totems and conscious effort of decolonization, they aren’t sold to think just a name change will erase this overpowering colonial legacy on African consciousness. Rather they are interested in a strategic and coordinated effort of populating the library with books by Kenyans and Africans. These books will, in the long run, do more decolonial work than just a name change.

The documentary is a sad reminder of the Kenyan government’s frustration of citizens’ goodwill and its disinterest in education. That Shiro and Wachuka lobbied the government for the library which is supposed to be part of their social responsibility is the first indication of the government’s disinterest in developing the philosophical and intellectual mindset of their citizens. An additional indication of disinterest is the lip-services acts and stalling of the team’s effort with bureaucratic jargon. The Kenyan government, similar to their contemporaries across the continent, aren’t invested in investing in the development of public consciousness. And it will be inaccurate to say African leaders don’t know the place or value of education. They send their kids, who are more likely to take over their posts, to the best Western schools. Their wariness of a reading and intellectually conscious citizens is political. They are fiercely opposed to nurturing a reading and enlightened population that will question their anti-people policies as exemplified in the recent protest in Kenya. Hence their constant reduction of investment and attention paid to education.

One of the documentary’s pleasures is that it isn’t really about a single thing. Yes, it’s mostly a pedantic documentation of the tedious and joyous restorative effort of Shiro, Wachuka and their team. But, it’s also about politicising public spaces, decolonisation, institutionalised amnesia, and cross-generational strain. Admirably, the documentary affords space for an overarching autobiographical narrative and tone. However, despite how tightly-woven the writing and story progression feels, it becomes fractured as it progresses. The inability of the directors to accurately sectionalise these different aspects, make it, towards the middle, jumbled and out of focus. A segmentation of the different aspects, would have allowed for a more concise and forceful impact on viewers.

However, as a viewer with limited understanding of the administration of a library space, it’s intellectually rewarding listening to these women and their team obsessively discuss the daily running of a library. Their intimate and strategy-and-action-poised conversations and meetings frame a library as not just a warehouse of books, but an environment for the creation and exchange of ideas, thoughts and knowledge. Capturing these numerous conversations is one of the highlights of the documentary.