Background

Ethnicity: Eugene Marais was of Dutch and French Huguenot descent.

Eugene Marais was born on January 9, 1871, in Pretoria, South Africa. He was the thirteenth child of Catharina and Jan Nielen Marais who once worked as a Government secretary. Trouble struck when Eugène's father was found to be involved in corruption and gross irregularities. He was eventually discharged and fired from his duties in 1867.

Education

Eugene Marais attended school in Pretoria, Boshof, and Paarl, and much of his early education was in English.

Career

Eugene Marais began his career at age nineteen as a journalist and editor of Land en Volk, a pro-Afrikaner newspaper. By the age of twenty, he became a co-owner of the paper and then the sole owner. At the outbreak of the Boer War between the Afrikaners and England, Marais was living in England. Because of the war, he was viewed as an enemy of England and was forced to leave the country. He went to Central Africa and tried to help the Afrikaner cause by smuggling guns and medical supplies to the Afrikaner army. Disgusted by the atrocities committed by the English army during the Boer War, Marais refused to write in English for some time and came to distrust the English influence in Southern Africa after their victory. By 1902 he was back in Pretoria working as a journalist and lawyer, and in 1910 he moved to Johannesburg.

During this period Marais was writing poetry in Afrikaans, a language developed by the Afrikaners who settled in southern Africa. His poems were deeply patriotic and became well known to his countrymen, who were called Boers by the English. His 1905 poem Winternag is considered one of the first important Afrikaner poems. Marais’s poems are also emotionally honest and reflect his disillusioned view of life. His poetry was later published in two collections and also made up part of his 1927 book Dwaalstories. In the book, Marais recounts several primitive mythical tales of his African homeland, some of which he heard when he moved to the mountains and encountered an African Bushman storyteller.

Marais’s move to the mountains resulted from his increasing withdrawal from normal social discourse and society. He was addicted to morphine, which he began taking at the age of twenty-one after reading Confessions of an English Opium-Eater as either the result or the cause of his bouts of depression. (Marais’s battle with morphine during a nine-month period is the subject of the 1977 film The Guest.)

He moved to a farm in the isolated Waterberg Mountains in South Africa in 1907. Apparently having made a substantial amount of money from his newspaper and other work, Marais was free to do what he wanted. He turned his attention to the natural life around him, beginning with termites and baboons. In 1925 he published his first, and at that time, the definitive, article on the habits of termites, or white ants.

Already in bad health and still suffering bouts of depression, Marais’s psychological condition worsened when, in the following year, Maurice Maeterlinck, a Nobel Prize winner, plagiarized Marais’s work and published The Life of the White Ant. Marais continued to work on his own book, however, and Die Siel van die Mier, or The Soul of the White Ant. was published in 1934. Suffering from depression and hooked on morphine, Marais committed suicide in 1936, a year before the English version of the book was published.

Achievements

• Eugene Marais is best remembered as the author of The Soul of the Ape. He was respected by the literature community. The Eugène Marais Prize for Literature, Life Eugène Marais Hospital, The Eugène Marais Foundation were established in his honor. A rare Waterberg cycad was named after him: Encephalartos Eugène-maraisii. He became one of the first people to conduct a long-term study of wild primates.

Works

More photos

• book

  • My Friends the Baboons

    (Written in the popular vein suitable to a newspaper reade...)

    1938
  • The Soul of the White Ant

    (This book by Eugene Marais is a passionate, insightful ac...)

    1934
  • Versamelde Gedigte 1933
  • The Road to Waterberg And Other Essays 1972

Religion

Eugene Marais was a self-confessed pantheist.

Personality

Eugene Marais kept a python as a pet. He was interested in minerals and prospecting.

Physical Characteristics: Eugene Marais began taking opiates at an early age and graduated to morphine (then considered to be non-habit forming and safe) very soon thereafter. He became addicted, and his addiction ruled his affairs and actions to a greater or lesser extent throughout his life.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Eugene Marais was a human community in the person of one man. He was a poet, an advocate, a journalist, a story-teller, a drug addict, a psychologist, a natural scientist. He embraced the pains of many, the visions of the few, and perhaps the burden was too much for one man... As a scientist, he was unique, supreme in his time, yet a worker in science then unborn." - Robert Ardrey.

Interests

• minerals, prospecting

Connections

Eugene Marais met his wife, Aletta Lettie Beyers, when he was twenty-one. She was twenty years old. They had a son, Eugène Charles Gerard. After the birth of their son, six months later, Lettie developed a puerperal fever. Later, his wife died.

Father:

Jan Nielen Marais

Mother:

Catharina Marais

late spouse:

Aletta Lettie Beyers

Son:

Eugène Charles Gerard Marais

Friend:

Gustav Preller

References

• Contemporary Authors
  2011