Two women in Nairobi, Shiro and Wachuka, have set out on an ambitious mission: to transform the neglected, historically whites-only McMillan Memorial Library into a vibrant, accessible public space that serves its local community. As the dust is brushed off the library’s archives of colonial Kenya and its stacks of books by majority non-African authors, thorny questions about the project emerge: found in every detail from the embedded bias of the Dewey Classification System, to the quietly troubling sources of funding they rely on to renovate the library. In a world where the call to “decolonise” our institutions has become widespread, How to Build a Library charts both the material and ideological complexities of what this means in practice.
CONTENT NOTES: Discussion of racism and colonialism; brief archival depictions of death, execution and dead animals.
ACCESS NOTES: Mainly visual storytelling and bright images.
+ short film: Space to Breathe
Screening as part of #TOAFF25
