In One Day I Will Write About This Place, Wainaina explores the complexities of African identity, beginning  with his childhood in Kenya, when the government tried to instill national pride by encouraging citizens to cast off their tribal heritage--an impossible goal in a country with many different ethnic groups and all the influences of American pop culture. ("Ray Parker Junior is the coolest man in the world," Wainaina says during a vivid recreation of the early 1980s. "We all want his hair.") The young Wainaina is already exposed to prejudice because of his Ugandan-born mother, but as he approaches adolescence, his father's tribal ancestry becomes another obstacle, keeping him and his sister out of the country's better high schools. Though the situation in Kenya never becomes as awful as it did in Rwanda in the 1990s, the pervasive tribalism never goes away.

Meanwhile, Wainaina--after two failed attempts to get a college degree in South Africa--begins to realize that his youthful passion for reading has prepared him for just one vocation. As he starts to submit work to newspapers and magazines, his voice comes to a Character Approved fruition. One Day I Will Write About This Place is a passionate portrait of 21st-century African life in all its contradictions--and though Wainaina is at turns angry and empathetic, he never excuses himself from the problems, and never fully gives up on the idea that he and his fellow Africans will be able to come together peacefully without abandoning what makes them unique.

[Images: Wengechi Muru (cover art); Jerry Riley (author photo)]