'Men are Not Taken as Lightly as That' : Power and Male Sexual Promiscuity in David G. Maillu's Unfit for Human Consumption

Abstract

Guided by the hypothesis that there is an association between the concepts ‘of power and sex in the minds of sexually aggressive men, this reading of Unfit for Human Consumption (1973), the first of the mini novels ' that launched David G. Maillu ‘s career on the path to the notoriety that it enjoyed in East Africa in the l970s and 1980s, argues that the text shows that the sexual promiscuity of the male mwananchi (plural: wananchi) — that member of ‘the masses of the people of the first decade of Kenya ‘s Uhuru, political lfldflpendenvc, is a doomed and wrong-headed attempt to assert a sense of the significance of the self/,' to be ‘man, ' in an environment in which the gender regime in place defines him as a ‘no man. ' The reading thus locates itself among a rich body of recent work that urges the serious examination of Kenyan popular literature.