Bonno Thoden van Velzen

Prof. Bonno Thoden van Velzen, in full: Hendrik Ulbo Eric ('Bonno') Thoden van Velzen (born 5 April 1933) is a Dutch anthropologist, Surinamist and Africanist. Born in the Dutch city of Flushing. His father was a coxswain at the merchant navy and teacher at the Rijksnormaalschool in the city of Deventer. His ancestors are Protestant pastors from the neighbourhood of Emden in East-Frisia, which is now part of the German federal state of Low Saxony.

In the Second World War he moved together with his parents and siblings to Utrecht because of the German Heer declared the city of Flushing and its surrounding as Sperrgebiet. He finished his secondary school in the Indonesian city of Batavia (now: Jakarta) and later in Flushing. After three year of military service, he began his study sociology at the University of Amsterdam in 1955. During his study he met his life partner Ineke van Wetering, with whom he set off to Suriname for a graduate studies at the Maroon society after his first graduation. He has been in field for the first time from May 1961 to November 1962, studying the Ndyuka, the biggest group of the Maroons. In 1966, he graduated and became employee of the Afrika-Studiecentrum in the Dutch city of Leiden, thus he spent three years in Tanzania. In 1971, he became professor of cultural anthropology, whereby he succeeded the seventy-year-old professor Fischer. He wrote his last article about Tanzania in 1977, whereupon he dedicated his work to the Ndyuka society of Suriname. From 1988 till 1999, H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen became professor at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, whereas he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990. H.U.E. wrote his last article in cooperation with his wife Wilhelmina van Wetering, who died from cancer in 2011. The book, called Een Zwarte Vrijstaat in Suriname was published in 2013.