Eugène Marais
Eugène Nielen Marais was a South African lawyer, naturalist, poet and writer. He has been hailed as an intellectual genius and an Afrikaner hero.
His early years, before and during the Boer War
Marais was born in Pretoria, the thirteenth and last child of Jan Christiaan Nielen Marais and Catharina Helena Cornelia van Niekerk. He attended school in Pretoria, Boshof and Paarl, and much of his early education was in English, as were his earliest poems. He matriculated at the age of sixteen.After leaving school, he worked in Pretoria as a legal clerk and then as a journalist before becoming owner of a newspaper called Land en Volk. He involved himself deeply in local politics.
He began taking opiates at an early age and graduated to morphine very soon thereafter. He became addicted, and his addiction ruled his affairs and actions to a greater or lesser extent throughout his life. When asked why he took drugs, he variously pleaded ill health, insomnia and, later, the death of his young wife as a result of the birth of his only child. Much later, he blamed accidental addiction while ill with malaria in Mozambique. Some claim his use of drugs was experimental and influenced by the philosophy of de Quincey.
Marais married Aletta Beyers, but she died from puerperal fever a year later, eight days after the birth of their son. Eugène Charles Gerard was Marais' only child.
In 1897 — still in his mid-twenties – Marais went to London to read medicine. However, under pressure from his friends, he entered the Inner Temple to study law. He qualified as an advocate. When the Boer War broke out in 1899, he was put on parole as an enemy alien in London. During the latter part of the war he joined a German expedition that sought to ship ammunition and medicines to the Boer Commandos via Portuguese East Africa. However, he was struck down in this tropical area by malaria and, before the supplies could be delivered to the Boers, the war ended.
After the war
From 1905 Marais studied nature in the Waterberg, a wilderness area north of Pretoria, and wrote in his native Afrikaans about the animals he observed. His studies of termites led him to conclude that the colony ought to be considered as a single organism, a prescient insight that predated the elaboration of the idea by Richard Dawkins. In the Waterberg, Marais also studied the black mamba, spitting cobra and puff adder. Moreover, he observed a specific troop of baboons at length, and from these studies there sprang numerous magazine articles and the books My Friends the Baboons and The Soul of the Ape. He is acknowledged as the father of the scientific study of the behaviour of animals, known as Ethology.Theft of his work
As the leader of the Second Afrikaans Language Movement, Marais preferred to write in Afrikaans, and his work was translated into various languages either late in his life or after his death. His book Die Siel van die Mier was plagiarised by Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck, who published La Vie des Termites, an entomological book, in what has been called "a classic example of academic plagiarism" by University of London's professor of biology, David Bignell.Marais accused Maeterlinck of having used his concept of the "organic unity" of the termitary in his book. Marais had published his ideas on the termitary in the South African Afrikaans-language press, both in Die Burger in January 1923 and in Huisgenoot, which featured a series of articles on termites under the title "Die Siel van die Mier" from 1925 to 1926. Maeterlinck's book, with almost identical content, was published in 1926. It is alleged that Maeterlinck had come across Eugene Marais' series of articles, and that it would have been easy for Maeterlinck to translate from Afrikaans to French, since Maeterlinck knew Dutch and had already made several translations from Dutch into French before. It was common at the time for worthy articles published in Afrikaans to be reproduced in Flemish and Dutch magazines and journals.
Marais sent a letter to Dr. Winifred de Kock in London about Maeterlinck, in which he wrote that
The famous author had paid me the left-handed compliment of cribbing the most important part of my work... He clearly desired his readers to infer that he had arrived at certain of my theories by his own unaided reason, although he admits that he never saw a termite in his life. You must understand that it was not merely plagiarism of the spirit of a thing, so to speak. He has copied page after page verbally.
Supported by a coterie of Afrikaner Nationalist friends, Marais sought justice through the South African press and attempted an international lawsuit. This was to prove financially impossible and the case was not pursued. However, Marais gained a measure of renown as the aggrieved party and as an Afrikaner researcher who had opened himself up to plagiarism because he published in Afrikaans out of nationalistic loyalty. Marais brooded at the time of the scandal: "I wonder whether Maeterlinck blushes when he reads such things , and whether he gives a thought to the injustice he does to the unknown Boer worker?"
Maeterlinck's own words in The Life of Termites indicate that the possible discovery or accusation of plagiarism worried him:
It would have been easy, in regard to every statement, to allow the text to bristle with footnotes and references. In some chapters there is not a sentence but would have clamoured for these; and the letterpress would have been swallowed up by vast masses of comment, like one of those dreadful books we hated so much at school. There is a short bibliography at the end of the volume which will no doubt serve the same purpose.
Despite these misgivings, there is no reference to Eugène Marais in the bibliography. Maeterlinck's other works on entomology include The Life of the Ant.
Professor VE d'Assonville wrote about Maeterlinck as "the Nobel Prize winner who had never seen a termite in his whole life and had never put a foot on the soil of Africa, least of all in the Waterberg.".
Robert Ardrey, an admirer of Eugène Marais's, attributed Marais' later suicide to this act of plagiarism and theft of intellectual property by Maeterlinck. Ardrey said in his introduction to The Soul of the Ape, published in 1969, that 'As a scientist he was unique, supreme in his time, yet a worker in a science unborn.' He also refers to Marais' work at length in his book African Genesis.
Death
There is evidence that Marais' time and research in the Waterberg brought him great peace and joy and provided him with artistic inspiration. In the poem Waar Tebes in die stil woestyn, he writes 'There would I know peace once more, where Tebes in the quiet desert lifts it mighty rockwork on high...'.. That said, Marais was a long-term morphine addict and suffered from melancholy, insomnia, depression and feelings of isolation.In 1936, deprived of morphine for some days, he borrowed a shotgun on the pretext of killing a snake and shot himself in the chest. The wound was not fatal, and Marais therefore put the gun barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He did so on the farm Pelindaba, belonging to his friend Gustav Preller. For those who are familiar with the dark moods of certain of Marais' poems, there is a black irony here; in Zulu, Pelindaba means 'the end of the business' – although the more common interpretation is 'Place of great gatherings'.
Marais and his wife Aletta are buried in the Heroes' Acre, Pretoria.
Legacy
Marais' work as a naturalist, although by no means trivial, gained less public attention and appreciation than his contributions as a literalist. He discovered the Waterberg Cycad, which was named after him. He was the first person to study the behaviour of wild primates, and his observations continue to be cited in contemporary evolutionary biology. He is among the greatest of the Afrikaner poets and remains one of the most popular, although his output was not large. Opperman described him as the first professional Afrikaner poet; Marais believed that craft was as important as inspiration for poetry. Along with J.H.H. de Waal and G.S. Preller, he was a leading light in the Second Afrikaans Language Movement in the period immediately after the Second Boer War, which ended in 1902. Some of his finest poems deal with the wonders of life and nature, but he also wrote about inexorable death. Marais was isolated in some of his beliefs. He was a self-confessed pantheist and claimed that the only time he entered a church was for weddings. An assessment of Marais' status as an Afrikaner hero was published by historian Sandra Swart.Although an Afrikaner patriot, Marais was sympathetic to the cultural values of the black tribal peoples of the Transvaal; this is seen in poems such as Die Dans van die Reën. The following translation of Marais' Winternag" is by J. W. Marchant:
"Winter's Night"
O the small wind is frigid and spare
and bright in the dim light and bare
as wide as God's merciful boon
the veld lies in starlight and gloom
and on the high lands
spread through burnt bands
the grass-seed, astir, is like beckoning hands.
O East-wind gives mournful measure to song
Like the lilt of a lovelorn lass who's been wronged
In every grass fold
bright dewdrop takes hold
and promptly pales to frost in the cold!
While the above translation is generally faithful, and is a fine poem in English, it does not quite capture the terse directness of the Afrikaans language, which makes Afrikaans poetry so bittersweet and evocative, striking straight to the heart and soul. Below follows a translation by Farrell Hope, which may closer reflect the original Afrikaans idiom. Note the above version by J. W. Marchant, as well as the third version below by At de Lange, both translate the Afrikaans word in the poem skade as if it was skadu''. This is a common error in translating the poem and misses the point Marais was making: that the British forces had destroyed the Boer farms.
"Winternight"
O cold is the slight wind,
and keen.
Bare and bright in dim light
is seen,
as vast as the graces of God,
the veld's starlit and fire-scarred sod.
To the high edge of the lands,
spread through the scorched sands,
new seed-grass is stirring
like beckoning hands.
O mournful the tune
of the East-wind refrain,
like the song of a girl
who loved but in vain.
One drop of dew glistens
on each grass-blade's fold
and fast does it pale
to frost in the cold!
An English translation by At de Lange preserves the musicality of the poem quite well:
"Winter's Night"
O cold is the windlet
and spare.
And bright in the dim-light
and bare,
as vast as God's mercy has bade,
lie the plains in starlight and shade.
And high in the ridges,
spreaded in burnt ditches,
are the grass plumes stirring
like beckoning hands.
O tune with grief laden
on the east wind's drone,
like the song of a maiden
in her love made alone.
In each grass blade's fold
a drop of dew gleams bold,
and it pales quickly
to frost in the cold!