Film Title: How to Build a Library
Director: Maia Lekow, Christopher King
Screenwriters: Maia Lekow, Christopher King, Ricardo Acosta
Production Companies: Circle and Square Productions
Release Date (USA, Sundance): Jan 26, 2025
Capone's Rating: 4⭐ out of 5⭐
When some of us hear the words "the legacy of colonialism," we don't know exactly what to picture. I usually imagine something ineffable-emotions, generational trauma or wealth, or control. But How to Build a Library is a film tackling the legacy of colonialism in a concrete manner, allowing those of us not experiencing the downsides (despite enjoying-ugh-many of its benefits without noticing) to understand at least some of its damage.
How To Build a Library follows two women, Shiro and Wachuka, as they fight for the funding and political support to empower communities through revitalizing and reinventing community libraries in Nairobi, Kenya. The main library they're working to improve has been there since long before 1958, the year when access opened to Black people. After that access changed, the library and its branches remained-before Shiro, Wachuka, and their organization Book Bunk got to it-a repository for evidence of White cultural domination. That physical evidence includes photographs of White imperialists lording over native peoples, the first hanging in British-controlled Kenya, books like British Colonial Theories, 1570-1850, old copies of English science fiction anthologies, and videos of natives performing dances for outsiders who could only see them as exotic subjects to be controlled through violence. In short, the modern people who actually live in and use the main library (named for imperialist McMillan) and its branches are nowhere represented in the collections as they existed at the time the film began documenting.
Libraries are excellent representatives of what the dominant culture in a given society values, and it makes me wonder: What do our libraries say about our own dominant cultures, and are we able to build representative spaces where all library patrons can see, find, and help themselves? (See my last film review, The Librarians, for why the answer to this question may not be so heartening.)
As sad as this cultural destruction and silencing is, in fact, the film is not primarily a documenting of these impacts of colonialism-its legacy, as it were. Rather, Wachuka and Shiro are triumphing, and this film holds a record of that triumph via beautification and democratization of a public space. If you're looking for a documentary depicting individual Kenyans taking action to improve their community, and you want a recognition of, yes, the legacy of imperialism without that being the core focus of the film-this is a film for you. How To Build a Library does not yet have distribution rights arranged, but we can hope for this outcome in the near future.
