Nairobi is the capital of hustle. Hatch a scheme, find an angle, work a connection, don’t stop until you make something, anything, happen. Blame—or give credit to—a poisonous colonial legacy, broken state, and limping economy for making hustle the pulsing energy that courses through the city.

Hustle is the mindset that drives equally a street hawker peddling floor mops to earn the shillings to scrape by for another day as it does the daughters of Kenya’s political elite trying to rehabilitate a downtown colonial-legacy public library. How to Build a Library, a documentary that premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, follows two women, publisher Angela Wachuka and author Wanjiru “Shiro” Koinange, on just such an undertaking.

Located on Banda Street in Nairobi’s Central Business District, McMillan Library was opened in 1931 serving whites only until 1958. Oversight (such as it has been) was handed over to the Nairobi City Council in 1962 in the lead-up to the country’s independence.

Outside and inside, the library is a time capsule of British rule that has hardly been updated since its founding. Its neoclassical architecture, including stone columns and recumbent lions guarding its entrance, clearly marks it as an alien implant in Nairobi’s city center. Strewn throughout the deteriorating interior are the detritus of colonialism’s material culture: oil portraits of white men, a tatty old lion-skin rug, and a pair of gigantic elephant tusks.

McMillan and its smaller, satellite libraries, Kaloleni and Makadara, are visible reminders of the persistence of the toxic colonial enterprise. But the state of neglect Wachuka and Koinange find them in is a product of Kenyan indifference since, what they call “decades of our own institutions’ failure.”

When the film’s cameras started to roll in 2017, the library’s collection of 400,000 objects was not fully cataloged, including parts of the library’s original and yet-to-be-modernized book inventory, rare archival photographs, and binders of newspaper issues from the colonial to independence period.

Wachuka and Koinange describe the effort to transform Nairobi’s libraries into contemporary, decolonized, community-centered urban institutions as their “life’s mission.” To realize this mission, they get their hustle on and begin swimming in the murky waters of local bureaucracy. McMillan chief librarian, Joseph Ananda, poses the question that sets up the entire film’s premise: “They’re strangers to the county government, and I’m an insider. Do these ladies know what they’re getting into?”

Co-directors and Nairobi residents Chris King and Maia Lekow trail Wachuka and Koinange as they and the organization they founded, Book Bunk, make progress—launching the digital catalog, filling the library shelves with books by African authors, and creating welcoming spaces for children to do homework.

They also stumble along the way. In one scene, an enthusiastic Koinange tries to prompt a group of McMillan workers assembled around a large table to offer input on Book Bunk’s efforts. She’s met with blank faces and dead silence. In another scene, staff members in the break room complain about the restoration efforts (“They have come to assist us,” one says, “but they don’t know”) and the interns who fail to show proper respect by greeting them. The so-called weapons of the weak—foot-dragging, dissimulation, and disparagement—are wielded deftly in defense of the status quo.

A debate over the replacement of the Dewey Decimal system symbolizes the clash between new and accustomed ways of managing the library. Negotiations to renew a memorandum of understanding with the county government that would enable the Book Bunk to continue its restoration effort drag on. The subtly savvy Ananda reminds Wachuka and Koinange to expect decision-makers considering their proposals to ask after their own self-interest first, “What is there to be gained?”

Throughout the film we watch Wachuka and Koinange cajoling mid-tier county officials over canapés, flattering the county governor with a guest of honor role at their annual gala, and hosting a site visit from King Charles and Queen Camilla. Wachuka and Koinange express discomfort at entertaining the embodiment of colonial rule that their project is geared toward dismantling, but they can’t turn down the fly-by royal viewing of a library. Especially since the British Council has provided significant funding for the project.

Lekow and King’s low-key observational style uses these small moments to reveal the realpolitik of good intentions running head-on into rent-seeking, bureaucratic inertia, and incentives at cross purposes. The approach of filming longitudinally is well suited to capturing the ceaseless slog of wheedling and wooing local officials, donors, and staff to the cause. The attention to all these micro-dynamics makes How to Build a Library an honest, fine-grained portrayal of modern, urban Kenya. From the same virtues also spring its limitations.

Character-driven documentary films depend on the choice of protagonists to carry the story. Wachuka and Koinange are clearly formidable in real life, but on screen they read as estimable, rather than captivating, personalities. That’s a shame because their A Palace for the People podcast is exceptional, thrumming with charm and a sense of real rapport between them. It is also surprising because Lekow and King’s previous documentary, The Letter, about an elderly woman facing accusations of witchcraft, combined nuanced analysis of fissures in Kenyan society while delivering a powerful, emotional punch.

If the protagonists’ journeys don’t provide an emotional narrative arc, then we’re relying on a story whose dramatic tension hinges on the signing of an MOU. The emotional payoff from watching fundraising events and negotiating paperwork with the local government authority ends up being pretty muted. Hustling for donations doesn’t particularly lend itself to cinematic treatment.

Furthermore, How to Build a Library fails to mine an obvious source of both narrative and historical tension. An honest reckoning with the past requires calling out how not only colonialism perpetuated itself, including through its public institutions, but also how the inheritors of the reins of power stuck to these patterns. The film should have been exquisitely placed to press on this point through the prism of Koinange’s family history: her grandfather served as a close advisor to independence leader and first president Jomo Kenyatta.

Wachuka and Koinange do credit scholar Joyce Nyairo with her observation about a deliberate “institutionalization of amnesia”—inherited from the colonial state—that is at the heart of the construction of the Kenyan nation. For the most part, however, the film follows the protagonists’ lead in avoiding examining the role of post-independence leaders in promoting this regime of silence.

The intertwining of Koinange’s lineage and Kenya’s nation-building history is not mentioned, nor is the intriguing irony that her quest to liberate Nairobi’s libraries from their pasts means in part facing up to hers. The documentary misses an opportunity to explore Kenyan leadership’s contribution to the erasure of public memory and to acknowledge that decolonizing alone doesn’t address some important dimensions of how power continues to be reproduced across generations.

A more explicit engagement with the contradictions of decolonization would have made How to Build a Library a stronger film and possibly also helped the filmmakers find the narrative hooks to transmute the abstract concepts of decolonizing institutions and reclaiming colonial-era public spaces, and some of the drier details of change management, into a more gripping tale.

This doesn’t detract from Lekow and King’s nuanced snapshot of modern-day Nairobi, and their attention, as the film’s name suggests, to the intricacies of the process. That they were committed to shooting for almost a decade and scored a premiere slot at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival (less than two percent of submitted feature films were accepted this year) marks them as uber-hustlers in their own right.

Moreover, the hustle continues for Wachuka and Koinange beyond the rolling of the film’s credits, not least to complete the step that would signal McMillan Library’s transformation into a truly contemporary institution serving the people—and one that is asked about regularly in the film: “When is the café going to open?”