‘How To Build A Library’: Sundance Review

Dirs: Maia Lekow, Chris King. 2024. Kenya. 103mins

If information is energy, then libraries should be defended in any respect prices. That’s the mindset of Nairobi residents Angela Wachuka and Shiro Koinange, longtime mates who’ve taken it upon themselves to renovate the Kenyan capital’s fading, severely uncared for colonial-era McMillan Memorial Library — and within the course of reclaim it for an impartial Black nation. Over the course of seven years, their idealism is challenged by a scarcity of funding, corrupt and self-serving native politics and a shocking pushback in opposition to change. Tracing all this, How To Construct A Library turns into a captivating take a look at the facility of particular person motion, and a thought-provoking examine of colonisation, freedom and illustration.

One hell of a protest story

That is the second function documentary from Kenyan filmmaker Maia Lekow and her Australian-born co-director and husband Chris King, whose The Letter was Kenya’s official Oscar entry in 2021. Powered by the power of its two immensely likeable topics, the movie ought to show an viewers pleaser when it makes its debut within the World Cinema Documentary strand at Sundance – which can also be premiering the Sarah Jessica Parker-produced The Librarians about guide bans throughout the USA. With libraries more and more underneath risk from right-wing ideology and lack of funding, How To Construct A Library ought to strike a well timed chord and, like its predecessor, embark on a wholesome pageant run.

We first meet Wachuka and Koinange in 2017 as, by their non-profit organisation Guide Bunk, they embark on their journey to rework Nairobi’s McMillan library from run-down relic to thriving group hub, taking up its administration from the County Authorities of Nairobi which has uncared for the constructing for years. They’re shouldering the prices themselves with none assure of long-term safety; makes an attempt to increase the unique five-year administration contract with the county make for an ongoing, emotional battle.

However that is greater than a ardour challenge for Wachuka and Koinange; it’s an try and proper the wrongs of historical past. The McMillan library — the second oldest in Kenya — was constructed by a British-American settler household to honour patriarch Sir William Northrup McMillan, and opened in 1931 for the unique use of white European patrons. It wasn’t till 1958, as Kenya approached independence, that the library turned open to all. But, as evidenced by the digicam’s preliminary gradual sweep of its contents, the library remained a memorial to colonial Africa. After we first step inside, there may be not an African writer to be discovered on its groaning bookshelves.

As Wachuka and Koinange set about overhauling this dusty constructing — along with two of its suburban branches — right into a thriving group hub (funded, notably, from abroad funds and benefactors together with the British Council) the digicam is there at each step. And because the staff begins to catalogue the library’s treasure trove of archive supplies, which have so far been unceremoniously boxed up within the basement, the filmmakers deftly weave in snippets of contextual archive footage — the pre-independence riots of the early Nineteen Sixties, Kenya’s first president Jomo Kenyatta, the 1969 assassination of influential commerce unionist Tom Mboya. The nation would appear to have come to date and but, as Wachuka and Koinange uncover, the previous methods nonetheless maintain agency. Modifying from Lekow, King and Richard Acosta emphasises the stronghold of the previous, and the countless institutional hurdles that should be overcome. 

The established librarians, for instance, cling onto the Dewey Decimel System; European categorisation that has an excessive bias in the direction of white male writers. The library should host a go to from King Charles with a purpose to enhance its profile and show its worth to the county authorities; a colonial throwback that isn’t misplaced on Wachuka and Koinange. And, regardless of quite a few guarantees, the county will solely prolong its contract with Guide Bunk if the county is given management of (and completely income from) the deliberate cafe and bogs, so taking doubtlessly profitable sources of income away from the library. And thru all of it, the unwavering dedication of those two girls makes for one hell of a protest story.