LENRIE PETERS

Lenrie Peters, in full Lenrie Wilfred Leopold Peters   (born September 1, 1932, Bathurst, Gambia) was a poet and novelist considered among western Africa’s most important poets during the second half of the 20th century.

Peters was educated at Bathurst and then Freetown, Sierra Leone. He moved to England and attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a medical degree in 1959, with further studies in surgery. He broadcast on several BBC programs (and chaired its Africa Forum) before returning to Gambia in 1969.

Peters’s only novel, The Second Round (1965), is semiautobiographical in its story of the disillusionment and alienation of a young doctor returning from England to Freetown after completing his medical studies and finding his home unsettled and unsettling, the people there having rejected all traditional values without substituting anything positive.

The doctor drifts among acquaintances for a time but finally seeks some meaning by working in an isolated up-country hospital. The work contains several classical allusions with the protagonist coming across as a thinker and idealist.

Peters’s poetry is what he is famous for all over the world, with countless students around Africa having studied at least some of his work over the years. Collections include Poems, 1964; Satellites, 1967; and in several anthologies. Pundits state that his poetry is essentially less pessimistic, characterized by a hope that good will prevail and by a sense of discovery.

However a fair number of his poems, however, tell of an estrangement similar to that in The Second Round, and others were scathing critiques of Westernization and contemporary African politics.

He issued two further collections of verse, Katchikali (1971) and Selected Poetry (1981). Peters also published short fiction and political commentary in an array of journals. He died in 2009.

Studies: 

Four modern West African poets by Romanus N Egudu 

The matter and manner of modern West African poetry in English : a study of Okigbo, Clark, Awoonor-Williams and Peters by Romanus N Egudu

A study of six African poets : voices out of the skull by Paul Theroux