Born in Oldenzaal, in 1935, I did my secondary education (gymnasium alpha) at the Minor Seminary of the Society for African Missions (Societas Missionum ad Afros, SMA) from 1948 to 1954; and my training in RC (Philosophy and) Theology at its Major Seminary from 1954 to 1961, after which I was ordained to the priesthood. After a ʽPastoral Yearʼ in Winneba, Ghana, from November 1961 to July 1962, with daily lessons in Twi, a major Akan dialect, I was appointed to St. Teresaʼs Minor Seminary at Amisano near Elmina to teach History. Some of those I taught are now in high positions: Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson is one of them; another is the Archbishop of Cape Coast, Matthias Kobena Nketsiah. Again others are the retired Archbishop of Kumasi, Thomas Kwaku Mensah, and the Bishop of Konongo-Mampong, Dr. Joseph Osei-Bonsu.
My next assignment was the study of Missiology and Anthropology of Religions at the RC University at Nijmegen, from September 1966 to March 1969. While at Nijmegen, I also applied for dispensation from the celibacy, which was granted in February 1969. On 15 April 1969, I married An Mercx, a midwife and nurse who had served at Assin-Foso RC Hospital from 1961 to 1965, and at Elmina from 1965 to 1966.
In May 1969, I was offered the post of Junior Lecturer in the Study of Religions at the KTHU, one the five RC KIWTOs, into which the former odd-forty Dutch RC Major Seminaries had merged. At the time of my appointment, 1.08.1969, KTHU was relocated at the Uithof, the new out-of-campus of Utrecht University, for a trial period of near fusion in teaching and research with the Faculty of Theology of Utrecht University. Being the only godsdienstwetenschapper on the KTHU staff, I was seconded to the vakgroep Godsdienstwetenschap of the UU Faculty of Theology and assigned classes on preliterate religions for the unified body of students, RC as well as those of the other denominations (NH, Baptist, Oud-Katholieken) that took part in that ecumenical venture.
I resumed my study of Twi, and the critical study of the history of the ethnography of Akan religion, and began to teach seminars (werkgroepen) in the comparative study of religions on subjects such as prophets in Africa, spirit possession, and pilgrimage, with an emphasis on research of rituals. I obtained my PhD at Utrecht University in March 1982. The Utrecht Faculty of Theology commissioned me to teach a course on ʽATRʼ, the indigenous religions of Africa, for six weeks each year at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) from 1985 to 1988.
As Secretary of the Nederlands Genootschap voor Godsdienstwetenschap (NGG) from 1986 to 1991, I took part in June 1988 as NGG-delegate in the meeting of the International Committee of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR-IC), at Marburg, in which I also presented a paper on the study of religions in Africa south of the Sahara. It caused the IAHR Executive to request that I develop ways and means by which scholars of religions in (mostly the Anglophone) universities in Africa might be gathered into a continent-wide, IAHR-affiliated association for study of religions. To that purpose, Jim Cox, then a lecturer at UZ, and I organized an IAHR-sponsored conference on the study of religions in African universities at UZ in Harare in September 1992. The African Association for the Study of Religions (AASR) was founded at that conference. It was formally admitted to the IAHR as a ʽregionalʼ affiliate in 1995 at the IAHR congress in Mexico City. AASR has been a major part of my academic life ever since. It is a continental as well as a global association for the study of the religions of Africa and its Diaspora.
Another major development in my academic career occurred in late 1990 when Lammert Leertouwer, newly appointed as rector magnificus of Leiden University, invited me to take over, as UHD, his teaching and research duties at the Leiden Faculty of Theology, thereby offering me the academic promotion which KTU, at the directives of the Dutch RC episcopate, had always denied me as a ʽmarried priestʼ.
I retired from Leiden University on July 1, 2000. Since then, our three sons have married. We are now a family of fifteen with seven grandchildren. In as far as my duties as husband, father and grandfather, and my age permit, I continue to be engaged in academic work.
