Schoffeleers was born on 31 August 1928, the eldest son of a farming family in the small village of Geverik, near the town of Beek, in the province of South Limburg in the southeast Netherlands.
[2] In 1955, Schoffeleers was sent as a missionary priest to Nyasaland, as Malawi was then known, and spent over two years based near Thyolo, where he witnessed an initiation ceremony soon after his arrival, which stimulated his interest in local religious customs.
[6] At that time, the Jesuit-run Lovanium University at Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo offered an anthropology course aimed at missionaries, and Schoffeleers studied there in the academic year 1963–1964.
The deteriorating security situation in the Congo prevented his return to Kinshasa,[8] so he transferred to the University of Oxford in 1966, joining St Catherine's College to study Social anthropology and, after gaining his B. Litt degree in June 1966, he registered for a D. Phil degree and returned to Malawi for further study of the M’Bona cult, masked societies and spirit possession in the south of that country.
[14] Schoffeleers later said that he left Malawi because the increasingly repressive regime of Hastings Banda had imprisoned some university students and was causing others to leave the country, so he saw no point in remaining there.
[16] During his time at the Free University, he encouraged his colleagues to make more international contacts and to publish their work in English to reach a wider audience.
[28] More specifically, M'Bona was said to have originated as a river god or spirit of a type known in the area of the Zambezi and its tributaries, either as a protector against floods or a provider of rain.
[32] The response that Schoffeleers made to Wrigley’s criticisms was that myth and history were not mutually exclusive, but could co-exist, so that M’Bona could be both an historical person and a manifestation of the mythical snake.
He also argued that available historical documents were sparse and written by Portuguese with little insight into African political or religious matters, so must be supplemented by oral history, including the various versions of the M’Bona story.
In Schoffeleers’ analysis, the religious element of a Nyau performance is the portrayal of the proper relationship between mankind and the natural environment it lives in, as represented by wild animals, and the restoration of harmony between the two.
[35] He also considered that the autonomy of most Nyau groups was a corrective to local chiefs who disturbed the social order by acting beyond their accepted role or in an arbitrary way.
[42] After over 30 years study of the M’Bona cult and story, Schoffeleers presented a synthesis in 1992, in which he claimed that both had originated in the context of a change in Portuguese policy in Zambezia in the 1590s when, instead of operating under the protection of local rulers, they set up fortified Portuguese enclaves, cooperating with some local rulers in attacking others, raiding for slaves and disrupting agriculture, causing suffering through an area that included southern Malawi, which at that time contained no powerful states.
[44] However, the alien Lundu rulers had no connection to, and no means of communicating with, the territorial spirits whose shrines they had destroyed so the original population regarded their rule as an illegitimate one.
Zionist churches, in her view, protested against South Africa’s power structures by rejecting the history that alien rulers had imposed on them, reconstructing their own identity through rituals that had a political dimension.
He argued that the Zionist churches’ focus on individual healing was essentially conservative, and that their cooperation with the South African government was less from fear of reprisals than from this conservatism, which made them non-political and acquiescent.
[49] His article was controversial, and led to Schoffeleers being attacked in print and verbally at a number of conferences, mainly because what he said was inopportune or politically inconvenient rather than not in accordance with the available evidence.
[50] In 1987, Schoffeleers presented a summary of the history of the Shire Valley in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, partly derived from oral sources, at variance with accounts based on documentary evidence.
Although accepting that there is no documentary evidence for this link, Schoffeleers mentions an oral tradition recorded in 1907, that a group whose name he translates as “Lundu’s men” who ravaged the middle Zambezi area at some unspecified past date were the Zimba.
[62] None of this proves the existence of a strong Lundu state in the 1590s, and Schoffeleers accepts that those Maravi with whom the Portuguese were actually in direct contact in that decade were organised only as small chiefdoms.
He was diagnosed as in the first stage of Alzheimer's disease in 2001, and his illness forced him to give up his Leiden apartment in 2006 and move to a Montfort community at Maastricht in the south the Netherlands, close to his birthplace.