African poet writing in Portuguese, whose verse expresses the sufferings caused by colonialist exploitation of the indentured labourers of the island of São Tomé.

Tenreiro, the son of a Portuguese administrator and an African woman, spent much of his life in Portugal, where he earned a doctorate in geography from the University of Lisbon in 1961. Subsequently, he worked as a professor at the Higher Institute for Overseas Social and Political Sciences in Lisbon and became a deputy representing São Tomé and Príncipe in the Portuguese National Assembly.

Tenreiro's two volumes of poems, Ilha do Nome Santo (1942; “Island of a Holy Name”) and the posthumous Coração em Africa (1964; “Courage in Africa”), record both a love of Africa as well as a fraternal bond with oppressed blacks throughout the world. A scholar of merit as well as a literary critic, he wrote Panorama de Literatura Norte-Americana (1945), which was inspired by reading black poets of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1958 he coedited, with Mário de Andrade, a major anthology of Lusophone African poetry, Antologia de Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa.