Thoden van Velzen was born on 5 April 1933 in Vlissingen. His father was a coxswain in the merchant navy and teacher at the Rijksnormaalschool in the city ofDeventer. 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 declaring the city of Vlissingen and its surrounds as Sperrgebiet. He finished his secondary school in the Indonesian city of Batavia and later in Vlissingen. After three years of military service, he began his study of sociology at the University of Amsterdam in 1955. During his study he met his life partnerIneke van Wetering, with whom he set off to Suriname for 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 obtained his doctorate under professor A.J.F. Köbben with a thesis titled: "Politieke beheersing in de Djuka maatschappij. Een studie van een onvolledig machtsoverwicht". The same year he became employee of the Afrika-Studiecentrum in the Dutch city of Leiden, and he spent three years in Tanzania. In 1971, he became professor of cultural anthropology at Utrecht University, and 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. Thoden van Velzen left Utrecht University in 1991, when his position was lost in a reorganization. From 1991 until his retirement in 1999, Thoden van Velzen was professor at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research. He was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990. Thoden van Velzen wrote his last article in cooperation with his wife Wilhelmina van Wetering. The book, called Een Zwarte Vrijstaat in Suriname was published in 2013. Near the end of his life, he was working on Prophets of Doom: A History of the Aukan Maroons which will be published by Brill Publishers. He died on 26 May 2020.
