What is “African writing”? As the Caine Prize for African writing celebrates its tenth anniversary, the question is harder to answer than ever. At a recent reader event, someone asked me, as a past Caine prizewinner, what an “African sensibility” is. The term clearly came from the Caine Prize's conditions of entry, which define an “African writer” as “someone who was born in Africa, or who is a national of an African country, or whose parents are African, and whose work has reflected African sensibilities.”

Three or four decades ago our ideas of belonging and nationhood were tightly constructed around race, and to many people, African literature was of little more than anthropological interest; a portrait of the native's humble way of life before it was corrupted by modernity. That narrow understanding was keenly felt by a number of African writers, most notably Dambudzo Marechera, who strove to escape the tag “African writer”. In the post-independence era that stereotype gradually gave way to another: the African writer as somebody who scribbled tales of injustice from the prison cell.

Today, contemporary African fiction is expected to tick all the boxes of a list that reads like the issues-to-be-addressed of an NGO - war, poverty, displacement, child soldiers - and African writers are assumed to be pedlars of autobiography. Readers keep asking if my novel Harare North, about an illegal Zimbabwean immigrant in London, is my own story. Perhaps I missed a trick.

Drawing Venn diagrams to locate the themes of African writing would end up excluding many worthy works, as a glance at previous Caine prizewinners shows: from Leila Aboulela's delicate exploration of otherness in a Scottish museum to E.C.Osondu's heart-rending account of a child's experience of refugee camp life; from Henrietta Rose-Innes's observations of a new South Africa to Monica Arac de Nyeko's lesbian lament, the styles and issues that the stories tackle are as diverse as would be found on any prize for world literature. At the heart of this diversity is the inescapable feature of every art form: it is not for any country, let alone a continent, that an artist responds to their calling; they write because they have to.

Africa's heritage comprises African, Arabic, French, British, Portuguese, Indian and Jewish cultures, many of which are reflected in the canon of African literature: Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Bessie Head, Nawal El Saadawi, Camara Laye, J.M. Coetzee, Doris Lessing. Many of these writers were at one stage writing away from Africa and some even chose not to go back. A significant number of contemporary African writers - Laila Lalami, Binyavanga Wainaina, Chika Unigwe, Petina Gappah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - are in the same position.

When a writer decides to leave Africa to settle in North America or Europe (I left Zimbabwe for London in 2002, aged 30), it is less likely to be to further their writing career than because the local environment has become inhospitable for further education. You discover that the libraries are better here. And, after a bottle or two, you decide that every African must travel to Europe to get a holistic perspective of Africa. It would not be outrageous to hear that some African dude learnt more about Africa from the National Archives at Kew Gardens than from his homeland.

That there are similarities between the new crop of African writers and the senior generation does not mean that they grapple with similar issues. While the earlier generations' material was largely steeped in the struggle for decolonising Africa, the younger generation, gazing at the world through the globe-shrinking IT technologies of recent years, is probably more concerned with reconstructing itself and finding its place in the global village. To this generation Ngugi wa Thiong'o's championing of African literature in indigenous African languages at the expense of African literature in English, French or Portuguese may begin to resemble a manifesto against self-reimagination, which is the gift that comes with every extra tongue inside one's mouth.

Ten Years of the Caine Prize is published by New Internationalist, £9.99

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