My paper takes as its starting point an analysis of the hero’s wife in Rafiki: Man Guitar (2013) authored by the Kenyan writer, Meja Mwangi. I show that while her femininity is emphasized by delineating her body as female, highlighting her role as wife, and alluding to her reproductive function; she nonetheless refuses to be constrained by gender role and transgresses into the male domain leading onlookers to call her a man. When she vows to run for political office she is labelled as desiring to be a Big Man, a term that designates a type of hegemonic masculinity. On the other hand, the book’s hero, Rafiki, is not interested in conventional ideas of manhood tied to a patriarchal ideal. He finds the roles of father, husband, protector, and breadwinner constricting. However, Rafiki accepts the role that biology confers on him as procreator while, paradoxically, refusing to actualize fatherhood in the way that his society defines it.
I argue that a reading of the novel requires a conceptual understanding of sex and gender as two separate but mutually constitutive concepts. In constructing a gender non-conforming hero, the novel which also operates on a strict binary of male and female sexual difference, inscribes alternative masculinities which produce the character of Female Big Man. While the Female Big Man offers little in terms of resisting bigmanity and the performance of patriarchal masculinity, she nonetheless forces apart naturalist associations of masculinity and biological maleness, and the association of power with male bodies.