Flawed legend — remembering, and learning from the chequered life of Eugene Marais

Towards the end of his life and especially after his death he was remembered as a hero of Afrikaner nationalism with his name emblazoned on many apartheid schools and street signs. If the people who lionised him had known that he came perilously close to committing treason during the Anglo-Boer War, they would surely have consigned him to the vullisblik of history.

Luckily, this didn’t happen and he is still remembered fondly by many South Africans. JM Coetzee famously said that “in Eugène Marais, South Africa came its closest yet to producing a genius”. While there are many potentially valid reasons (both personal and political) for cancelling Marais’ memory, I believe it’s important to remember him and all the other South Africans who don’t fit into convenient political boxes. Our past is far more nuanced than we realise and people like Marais have a lot to teach us.

Marais is one of 12 people featured in Legends: People Who Changed South Africa for the Better, which I co-authored with Matthew Blackman. Of the dozen legends included in the book, Marais is undoubtedly the least virtuous. While I stand by the assertion that he changed South Africa for the better, I definitely wouldn’t go so far as to say that he was good. 

But if I were choosing dinner party guests from the 12 men and women included in the book, he would top the list.

When he was just a teenager Marais carved a career for himself as a muckraking journalist who tore strips off Oom Paul Kruger in various newspapers. While Kruger is often seen as one of the heroes of Afrikanerdom it has been largely forgotten that there were many Dutch-speaking burghers who despised his conservative Dopper ways. Marais’ biting and outspoken journalism is as entertaining today as it was in the 1890s — and his courage in taking on the seemingly invincible father of the nation while just a boy is almost unprecedented.

Marais should be remembered for his journalism alone — but that was just one of his many talents. In 1893 he spearheaded the campaign of Slim Piet Joubert who came within a few whiskers of defeating Kruger at the polls. In fact, our analysis of the 1893 election in Spoilt Ballots suggests that Joubert did win — when faced with losing, Kruger simply cooked the books.

After that close scrape in the 1893 election, Kruger made life much harder for opposition journalists like Marais with a law dubbed the “hou-jou-bek wet”. It was around this time that Marais first tried morphine. His political and professional travails were compounded by the death of his wife in childbirth in 1895. What had started as a recreational drug habit became a crippling lifelong addiction. 

Despite his addiction, Marais would achieve remarkable things.

After his wife’s death, he sailed to London to study law, taking five years to complete a three-year degree. He despised the law (as he said: “no man with a soul higher than that of a field mouse can give himself perpetually to this kind of work”) and was never anything more than a mediocre lawyer. In London, he filled his time with extracurricular activities, among them adopting a marmoset and travelling to Germany to attend medical lectures. 

When the Anglo-Boer War broke out, still in London, Marais secretly agreed to translate Percy Fitzpatrick’s anti-Kruger manifesto The Transvaal from Within into Dutch. In April 1902 he left the UK with British permission, in order to restart his anti-Kruger newspaper Land en Volk “with an editorial slant aimed at convincing Boers after the war to reconcile themselves to British rule, and to be obedient subjects,” according to his biographer Carel van der Merwe, who unearthed Marais’ close ties with the British establishment more than a century after the fact. 

After a few disappointing years in Pretoria, Marais moved to the Waterberg to prospect for tin. There he spent the best part of three years observing a troop of chacma baboons, becoming the first person to observe primates in the wild. While in the Waterberg, Marais also made prolonged studies of termites, ultimately advancing the theory — now regarded as scientific fact — that the entire colony should be seen as a single organism.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Eugene Marais: Worker in a science yet unborn

Marais’ newspaper articles and books about natural science, as well as his adaptations of African folk tales into Afrikaans, made him a household name in South Africa. And when it emerged that his work on termites had seemingly been plagiarised by the Belgian Nobel Laureate Maurice Maeterlinck he became an unlikely poster boy of Afrikaner nationalism. 

During his lifetime, Marais’s scientific exploits were only really known in South Africa. In 1961, an American screenwriter, Robert Ardrey, brought them to global attention with the publication of African Genesis, which he dedicated “to the memory of Eugène Marais”. While many in the popular press were convinced by Ardrey’s claims that Marais laid “out the basics of primate field research decades before it became a professional field on its own,” the scientific community was — and is — more critical.

In 1936, after a few days without a morphine fix, Marais borrowed a shotgun on the pretext of wanting to kill a snake and shot himself — once in the chest and then, to make sure of things, again in the mouth. It was, in many ways, a miracle that he lasted that long: his life was often wretched.

Objectively, Marais’ greatest contributions were as a writer. His poem, Winternag, is widely regarded as the first Afrikaans poem worth reading and his journalism, short stories and other poems are all first-rate. But I reckon his boundless curiosity, and his unwillingness to be boxed into the conventional South African narrative, are even more valuable.

Today, 153 years after his birth, his remarkable life deserves to be remembered. DM