Public spaces? Public goods? Reinventing Nairobi's public libraries

In a fast-growing and changing city such as Nairobi, some public buildings and services have changed remarkably little over the decades. Such is the case with the McMillan Memorial Library, built in 1931 and situated in Nairobi’s Central Business District (CBD), but also of the less known public libraries of Kaloleni and Makadara, two poorer areas of Nairobi. Ever since their respective creations all three libraries, which are referred to collectively as the ‘McMillan libraries’, have continuously delivered a much-needed public service to a population thirsty for education and safe spaces to study, in spite of a lack of investment and increasing state of decay. Book Bunk, a small civil society organisation founded in 2017 by Angela Wachuka and Wanjiru Koinange, two Kenyan book professionals, has resolved to address the matter by setting up a partnership with Nairobi City County Government, assessing needs (from an architectural, inventory and users’ perspective), rehabilitating the buildings and exploring new ways in which they and their historical and new contents might be explored, questioned and appropriated by Nairobi’s population. In this chapter, I first show that the libraries, through Book Bunk’s work on them, have become the sites of an important reflection on the role libraries can play in better representing and understanding Kenya’s colonial past, building a more inclusive culture and offering a different public space and service. In other words, Book Bunk’s work on the libraries is placing these three outdated but tranquil refuges at the heart of crucial and heated public debates about history, memory and collective imagination and representation. In the remainder of the chapter, I discuss how Book Bunk is attempting to define a fine line between discarding and preserving history with regard to the libraries’ buildings, books and purpose. In doing this, Book Bunk and the libraries are offering their own answers to global debates about decolonising our public spaces, making history and memory accessible to all and offering a platform to Kenya’s many, including female, voices.