POV

Do you guys smell books?

Library books smell particularly nice.

Okay.

Not all of them.

- I was actually trying to find books by African authors.

I did not today.

That's disturbing.

When it was opened in 1931, this library was purposefully for white use, and then eventually with independence coming that's only when it was actually to use by Africans.

So for more than 50 years now there was never an attempt to decolonize that quite purposefully.

And so I suppose in our own crazy way we're challenging that.

So what do you want to do here?

- We want to bring new books, computers, install Wi-Fi, build a proper toilet.

- By when?

- We need to find the money first.

- Oh.

So the County have asked for the list of people who are coming.

They're like, "Oh, so you invited the Senator but not the Governor."

And then they're doing that thing of protocol.

We don't want to politicize the thing.

What we're interested in is restoring the library.

- Publicly, everybody thinks we're good.

And I'm just like, "We've never been worse."

Because if we invest that amount of money into a building knowing what we know about the fracturedness of our state, it's gonna be our asses on the line, and that is becoming more and more real.

"One of the most glaring fault lines in the construction of the Kenyan nation is not the absence of memory, but rather the deliberate institutionalization of amnesia."