As media, we tend to amplify the big moments, the street demonstrations, the chants, the placards held high, the coming together as people, but sometimes we forget how much change actually happens quietly.
In meeting rooms. In dusty storage archives. In the mundane but relentless work of people who decide that if no one else will fix what’s broken, they will.
“How to Build a Library” is a film about exactly that kind of change: the soft-spoken, stubborn kind that transforms a country not overnight, but over years.
From the moment we meet Wanjiru Koinange and Angela Wachuka, the founders of Book Bunk, it’s clear that their mission isn’t glamorous but it’s necessary.
The film follows them as they take on the monumental task of restoring Nairobi’s historic McMillan Memorial Library, a once-grand colonial relic built in 1932 exclusively for white patrons.
Their frustrations are immediate and familiar: bureaucratic delays, unclear approvals, a public institution long neglected by the very government meant to protect it.
Yet their commitment never wavers. As director Maia Lekow put it, “The McMillan Library wasn’t just a building in need of restoration, it was a powerful symbol of Nairobi’s history, resilience and identity.”
And that tension, between a painful past and a determined present, sits at the heart of the film.
The directors don’t shy away from the library’s colonial legacy. They confront it head-on as scenes show members of the Book Bunk staff uncover pictures, logs and letters detailing the brutality meted out by our colonial overlords.
So when the film cuts to the 2024 visit by King Charles III and Queen Camilla toward the end, the irony lands effortlessly.
Here are the modern-day symbols of a former empire, strolling past the architecture that empire left behind, even as Kenyans fight to reclaim it for themselves. The film doesn’t tell you how to feel about that moment; it trusts you to feel it.
Beyond its determination not to gloss over Kenya’s blood-soaked history, one of the film’s greatest strengths is its eight-year timeline. In the sense that as you watch the documentary, time becomes your companion, slow, steady, sometimes frustrating, always honest.
Shiro and Wachuka’s hair changes. Meetings pile up. Plans are revised. Life happens. And in that span, you begin to understand just how much of themselves the two women pour into this work. Their passion becomes the film’s emotional heartbeat.
And importantly, the film shows that their work isn’t limited to Macmillan. The Kaloleni Library, also part of the Book Bunk vision, is also restored and opened. As it is already serving the public, it stands as proof that this kind of slow, quiet work can succeed. It’s a needed contrast: one library revived, another still in the middle of its rebirth.
By the film’s end, Book Bunk’s work remains unfinished. The doors are partly open, the work very much ongoing, a reminder that rebuilding a country’s institutions doesn’t happen on cue or by closing credits.
The film’s final act brings us back to the Kenya of 2024 and the country’s defining moment that year, the protests against the Finance Bill.
Young Kenyans flood the streets in the film demanding accountability from their leaders, and it works remarkably well as a closing sequence. Watching this alongside footage from eight years earlier, the contrast is striking. Kenya has changed. Kenyans have changed.
In its closing, the film subtly suggests that restoring a library and demanding better governance spring from the same impulse: the belief that public spaces, public institutions, and public power belong to the people.
Ultimately, “How to Build a Library” is a love letter to the art of quiet protest. Not the kind shouted in the streets, though those, too, have their place, but the kind done in the hum of everyday labour.
Cataloguing. Painting. Debating. Restoring.
This is resistance in its most patient form: fighting neglect not with anger, but with care.
