He may be political but don't expect Binyavanga Wainaina to toe any party lines, writes Melissa de Villiers

In 2005, Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina published a now-celebrated piece in Granta magazine lampooning Western literary portrayals of Africa. Writers should always include, he said, a description of a big, red sunset and a Starving African who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, waiting for the benevolence of the West. Taboo subjects? Ordinary domestic scenes, references to African writers or intellectuals, and any mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

"Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances," the piece concludes. "Because you care."

This furious broadside became the most-forwarded article in Granta's history and established Wainaina as one of the most interesting new voices of his generation.

Now his own book about Africa has been published, the memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place. An original account of a writer finding his voice, Wainaina's debut work extends the concerns of his Granta piece, challenging mainstream perceptions and accounts of the continent as merely some benighted place rife with famine and war.

From boarding school exam fever to black-mamba bicycle bells, from suburban hair salons to Nairobi sidewalks full of "sweet talk and hustle", his book depicts ordinary lives playing out in quotidian environments that nonetheless brim with ideas, innovation and idiosyncratic dreams.

The book took Wainaina seven years to write. "I was trying to do something new and adventurous with the language I was using," he tells me down a crackly telephone line from London. "I wanted to create a vehicle that captured the imagination of childhood. And it took me a long time before I understood that playing around with the language was actually at the heart of what the book was about."

The book's language is certainly remarkable: fizzing with energy and full of big emotions that try to nudge words into bright new shapes.

In one passage, a 12-year-old Wainaina is watching Kenya's Independence Day ceremony on television. His young nanny, Wambui, turns down the volume and starts singing a BoneyM song in her strong Gikuyu accent, her unruly pronunciation of the English "n" and "d" making its own subversive soundtrack to the pictures on the screen: "N starts to agitate, standing there in straight colonial stadium lines ... D shakes like an accordion and wriggles across to N; they start to do a waltz. Kanu Khartoon Khaki wants them to behave, be what you are supposed to be ... do what Kenya Khaki says. Kanu, our one party, is father and mother, says President, and Khaki people salute ... Wambui dances across the carpet, mouth open, singing her M'Boney M song ... I close my eyes and let her limbs climb into my mind's living room, where the ... disco ball throws a thousand nipples of light."

The middle-class product of a Gikuyu father and a Ugandan mother with Rwandan roots, Wainaina grew up speaking English, but invented the word "kimay" as a child to describe the plethora of languages he heard around him but could not speak: "Ki-kiyu, Ki-Kamba, Ki-Ganda, Ki-sii, Gujarati . . ."

The relationship between language and identity is one of the book's central concerns. "Literature in English is still dominated by writers who come from a monolingual background," Wainaina tells me. "So I'm excited about the possibility of using English as it's spoken by people who move easily from one tongue to another - from one way of being to another. Put it this way, I'm more and more disinterested in writing in the kind of English that cannot cope outside its own clime."

Also interwoven into Wainaina's story are the shifting political scenarios that have shaped his views on family, ethnicity and nationhood. Despite getting excellent grades, he was denied entrance to Kenya's best high schools due to his Gikuyu heritage. Later, he enrolled for a BComm at the then University of Transkei, arriving in 1991, when "all over South Africa (was) liberation talk". His choice of degree was not a success: Wainaina spent five years in Umtata avoiding lectures and eventually abandoned his course. He desperately wanted to be a writer, but was afraid of failure. Too ashamed to tell his parents, he fell into a slump, but slowly the stories began to come.

It was the Sunday Times that gave Wainaina his first break, publishing a travel piece about a trip to Uganda to attend his grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary. Fine-tuned into an essay, it went on to win the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2002. Wainaina put his prize money to good use, founding the literary journal Kwani?.

All this makes for an exhilarating read, although the book is not without its omissions. The complicated issue of African writers who rely on the West's liberal largesse for funding, awards and fame, even as they rail against its racism, is touched on, but not fully explored. Wainaina makes ironic references to his own complicity in this regard, but the issue is played down.

His next project will be a novel, he says, although he shudders at the very idea that it should by necessity contain some kind of "postcolonial theme".

"I have no ability to manipulate myself to suit the postcolonial situation, or the Afro-political situation, or anything else," he says. "Am I a political writer? Yes, but I'm far more interested in texture, in aesthetics, in word play - in capturing the smell and feel of things. So one thing my work is not going to do is fulfil any kind of 'theme'."

He pauses. "I don't write for that," he says. "I write because I'm a kind of dreamy person who can't do anything else."

• One Day I Will Write About This Place, published by Penguin, R245.