Peter Enahoro

Peter Enahoro was a Nigerian journalist, author, businessman and publisher who was born in Uromi, Edo State, Nigeria. He was the first modernist poet of Anglophone Africa, and he is best known for his early experimental novel, The Voice (1964), and his award-winning poetry, published in The Fisherman's Invocation (1978) and The Dreamer, His Vision (2005). In both his poems and his prose, Okara drew on African thought, religion, folklore and imagery, and he has been called "the Nigerian Negritudist". According to Brenda Marie Osbey, editor of his Collected Poems, "It is with publication of Gabriel Okara's first poem that Nigerian literature in English and modern African poetry in this language can be said truly to have begun." He attended the landmark African Writers Conference held in 1962 at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, along with other prominent writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. He worked as a bookbinder, a printer, a journalist, and a civil servant. He was also a commissioner for information, culture, tourism and strategy for Bayelsa State, and a special adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan on research, documentation and strategy. He died on April 24, 2023, at the age of 88, from natural causes. He was buried on June 5, 2023, in London, England. He is survived by his wife and children.