At the 2025 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, writer-directors Maia Lekow and Christopher King premiered their documentary How to Build a Library, chronicling the eight-year grassroots effort by author Shiro Koinange and publisher Angela Wachuka to renovate and decolonize Nairobi’s historic 1931 McMillan Memorial Library and its regional branches.
When writer-directors Maia Lekow and Christopher King walked onto the stage at the Egyptian Theatre for the January 26 premiere of their feature documentary, How to Build a Library, they weren’t just showcasing a film. They were presenting an eight-year labor of love that reframes what cultural infrastructure means in East Africa. Premiering in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, the project captures a high-stakes local battle over history, bureaucracy, and public space in Nairobi, Kenya.
Here is the kicker: this isn’t a sleepy historical retrospective.
The Bottom Line
- The Core Mission: Author Shiro Koinange and publisher Angela Wachuka signed a five-year contract in 2017 to manage and renovate Nairobi’s colonial-era McMillan Memorial Library alongside the Makadara and Kaloleni branches.
- <The Obstacles: The duo faced fierce pushback from administrators over the outdated Dewey decimal system—which entirely lacked classifications for African literature—and fought to purge colonial reading lists.
- The Festival Run: Captured over nearly a decade, the documentary made its international splash at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, though major fundraising and actual construction on the primary McMillan building remain ongoing.
Decolonizing the Shelves in Nairobi
Built in 1931 during the British colonial era, the McMillan Memorial Library was originally designed exclusively for use by white people. Decades after independence, the institution’s collection still reflected that exclusive, British-centric perspective. When Koinange and Wachuka stepped in, taking over management alongside two smaller regional branches through a hard-fought government contract, they immediately confronted a massive ideological hurdle.
Parents and community members were outraged by the exclusionary reading materials remaining on the shelves. But updating the inventory meant colliding directly with rigid institutional legacy systems. Koinange and Wachuka went head-to-head with library administrators fiercely defending the status quo—specifically the traditional Dewey decimal system, which structurally omitted African languages and indigenous literary traditions. For the project’s leaders, keeping the old system meant keeping the colonial past alive.
Yet Lekow and King bet on the universal resonance of the narrative, embedding themselves with Koinange and Wachuka as they negotiated political red tape, fundraised against the odds, and ultimately reopened the fully renovated Makadara Library branch to the public.
Navigating Political Minefields on Camera
Documenting real-time institutional reform is a journalistically perilous exercise. Lekow and King made the deliberate, risky decision to feature local politicians directly in the documentary, operating without a safety net regarding how those officials might react to the final edit.
“Chris and I knew that this wasn’t going to be quick work for hire,” Maia Lekow recalled during the Sundance Q&A. “We were going to independently take this project on, and that’s how it began. We knew that this library was a vehicle for so many conversations and important conversations that had to happen.”
That independence is precisely what gives the film its sharp editorial edge. While the filmmakers informed the library’s largest donor about the project, they walked a tightrope, knowing that ongoing fundraising efforts could be jeopardized if political subjects took umbrage at their portrayal. But the math of cultural preservation tells a different story: without transparency, the community ownership driving the project would ring hollow.
| Project Milestone | Year / Timeline | Key Details |
|---|---|---|
| Contract Execution | 2017 | Shiro Koinange and Angela Wachuka secure a five-year management contract for McMillan Memorial Library and two branches. |
| Principal Documentation | 2017–2025 | Filmmakers Maia Lekow and Christopher King capture eight years of community outreach, administrative clashes, and political negotiations. |
| Festival Premiere | January 26, 2025 | World premiere in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. |
The Global Resonance of Local Archives
How to Build a Library arrives at a moment when institutional intellectual freedom is under intense global scrutiny, sitting alongside festival stablemates exploring similar struggles over public memory.
While the filming is complete, the physical labor in Nairobi is far from finished. Funding is still actively being raised, and heavy construction on the primary McMillan building has yet to break ground. Yet, as local residents interviewed in the film make clear, the project represents something much larger than masonry and shelving. As Christopher King noted ahead of the premiere, “It’s about building a country, building a generation, and building a culture. This is our Nairobi.”
What do you think is the biggest challenge facing independent documentaries tackling systemic reform today? Drop your thoughts in the comments below.
