Henri Frans de Ziel

On 21 November 2005, a monument was dedicated in his honour on the Sophie Redmondstraat in Paramaribo. His ashes and the ashes of his wife, Hulda Walser, were also placed at the monument. A documentary film, Trefossa: I Am Not I (Trefossa: Mi a no mi), by filmmaker Ida Does, was produced in 2008.

In 1969, his health started to deteriorate, and he was admitted to the sanatorium Zonneduin in Bloemendaal. Here he met his wife, Hulda Walser, whom he married in 1970. On 3 Februari 1975, de Ziel died in Haarlem.

Trefossa was annoyed about the negative nuance in the National Anthem at time, and started to transform the second stanza into a positive message. Trefossa combined this with a poem he wrote in Sranan Tongo on the death of Ronald Elwin Kappel. His anthem was unanimously approved by the Government of Suriname on 7 December 1959. De Ziel originally used a melody by Johannes Helstone, however the government preferred the original 1876 melody.

He was an educator and lived in the Netherlands from 1953 to 1956. Upon his return to Suriname he was part of the editorial staff of the magazines Tongoni (1958-1959) and Soela (1962-1964). He also served briefly as the director-librarian of Suriname's Cultural Centre (Cultureel Centrum Suriname (CCS)). He subsequently returned to the Netherlands to work on the publication of Johannes King's memoirs.

Henri Frans de Ziel (15 January 1916 – 3 February 1975), working under the pen name of Trefossa, was a neoromantic writer in Dutch and Sranan Tongo from Suriname. He is best known for the Sranan Tongo stanzas of Suriname's National Anthem.