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Interview with Gambian writer Lenrie Peters

Lenrie Peters, poet and novelist (b. 1932), was educated at the universities of Cambridge and London. A practising surgeon, he has been a journalist (African programs with the BBC), President of the board of directors of the National Library of The Gambia and Gambia College, and member of the jury for the Commonwealth Writers Prize competition. His first poems were published in 19641 and his first novel in 1965. The Second Round (London: Heinemann) is about a British-trained African physician, a victim of the 'massacre of the soul' wrought by Westernization, who returns to the capital city of his native land full of 'noble ideas about progress in Africa' but ends up taking a post in a remote bush hospital, thus immersing himself more deeply in the traditional experience. In 1967, Peters published Satellites (Heinemann), a collection of fifty-five poems where intimate emotion is combined with a deep meditation on human dignity and justice. Four years later, he published another collection of sixty-nine poems under the title of Katchikali (Heinemann), which is a sacred crocodile pool in Bakau, in the Greater Banjul Area. In 1981, he published his Selected Poetry. The new poems in the collection castigate the corrupt greed of tribalized leadership elites and balance nostalgia for a pastoral past with cautious assertions of hope for a future built on that past. He is generally regarded as one of the most intellectual poets of his generation. Ideas about politics2, evolution, science, and music inspire his images in the form of debates. The interview took place in Banjul on 3 June 2005.