‘n Artikel deur Leon Rousseau in die Suid-Afrikaanse Sunday Times van 24 September 2000.

“He was never to live in the Waterberg again,” I wrote of the enigmatic Eugène Marais in his life story. “He was never even to visit it. But all his life, always, always, he was to long for it.”

Marais arrived in the Waterberg in 1907, when he was 36. He left it early in 1916, never to return.

During those years, he found brief happiness, even though towards the end of the period, drug-dependence plunged him into new depths of despair.

During the same eight years he collected the material for at least three books which were to become famous. They were My Friends the Baboons, The Soul of the White Ant and Dwaalstories (Wandering Tales).

A fourth book, The Soul of the Ape, completed in 1919, might just have made him world famous if it had been published then, but in fact half a century was to pass before it appeared in book form in 1969, 33 years after his death.

Marais was born in Pretoria in 1871. Although the capital of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek was little more than a village then, it was soon to start growing rapidly, especially after the discovery of gold in 1886.

By 1890 Marais, then only 19 years old, became the editor of Land en Volk, the only Pretoria newspaper to oppose President Paul Kruger.

At the age of 20, he became co-owner of the paper, and soon afterwards its sole proprietor.

Influenced by De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, one of the classics of the 19th century, Marais started taking morphine, an opium derivative, when he was 21. In 1895 his beautiful young wife died in childbirth, leaving behind a baby son. There may be truth in the popular idea that this was a blow from which he never quite recovered.

In 1897 Marais was admitted to the Inner Temple in London, obtaining a degree in law about five years later. During this time he also acquired some knowledge of medicine.

In South Africa the Anglo-Boer War had broken out. In 1902 Marais joined an expedition to smuggle medical supplies and ammunition to the Boer forces via East Africa, but the end of the war also put an end to the expedition, which by this time had reached Beira.

Marais seems to have made a good deal of money from his newspaper (before the Anglo-Boer War) as well as from his practice as an advocate after his return from London.

He was regarded as a wealthy man when he settled in the Waterberg in 1907.

What he seems to have sought there was a retreat from the world and its weary round. By this time he was 36, a deeply disillusioned man.

Marais soon went to live on the farm Rietfontein, the property of Oom Gys and Tant Maria van Rooyen.

In a classic essay, The Road to Waterberg, he has left a description of what it was like to be taken there early in the 20th century from Nylstroom by an acquaintance, Dolf Erasmus: “The horses had to be fed before we started. It was decided that we should travel by night so as to reach our destination in the central hills of Waterberg somewhere about sunrise.

“While we waited, darkness succeeded dusk and the little village sank into dreamy quietness. Lights began to twinkle through the windows. From one cottage came the notes of a piano and across the river the jackals howled incessantly. It seemed the very line of contact between civilization and the wilderness – the little ‘stream of Nile’ serving as a common frontier.”

Which reminds one that the first Voortrekkers, having trekked so far north, thought that they had reached one of the streams which fed the Nile.

Today it is an easy trip.

Head north on the N1 (Kranskop Toll Road) from Pretoria or Johannesburg and pass Warmbaths and Nylstroom. Then turn west on the R520 at Naboomspruit and you soon reach a tourist haven at the mineral springs. This is what used to be lovely Rietfontein, where Marais lived for eight years in a stoepkamer.

Behind the farmhouse lay some low hills where he would stroll between the numerous termite mounds to watch the white ants at work. The observations he made here were later to form the nucleus of Die Siel van die Mier (translated as The Soul of the White Ant).

About 8km from Rietfontein, on the way to Nylstroom, lay the farm Doornhoek. A tin mine was established here during Marais’ sojourn.

On this farm, too, lay the Bobbejaankloof, which was home to a troop of about 300 baboons. Marais and a friend stayed for some time in a shack in the kloof to be near the primates they were studying.

Their observations and the insights Marais gained from them formed the basis of a serious work later to be called The Soul of the Ape.

They also led to a more popular work, Burgers van die Berge (My Friends the Baboons), first published in book form in 1938, two years after Marais’ death.

On a Friday or Saturday evening the horses drawing Marais’ Cape cart could usually be seen trotting from Rietfontein to the hotel at Naboomspruit, where the owner, Armstrong, and remittance men like Leroyd and Graves would wait for Marais to join them. Remittance men were the black sheep of prominent British families who were paid a sizeable allowance on condition that they stayed in the colonies and did not show their faces at home.

“They often played poker until two o’clock in the morning,” Marais’ son told me more than 30 years ago.

“Apart from Armstrong, Graves and Leroyd, there was also a police sergeant, a certain De Beer. I remember De Beer always having a water glass full of brandy for every tot the others ordered.”

Less frequently, Marais would visit Nylstroom, a larger village, where one of his friends was Emil Tamsen. He had come to the Waterberg from Germany when he was 16 and now had a shop, with the nature of its wares, including curios, indicated by a stuffed 3.7m-long crocodile mounted above the shop front.

Wild animals from all over the Waterberg were brought to Tamsen’s farm, Tweefontein, about 13km from Nylstroom, and then shipped to the famous game park Carl Hagenbeck had set up near Hamburg, Germany.

Another close friend Marais made in Nylstroom was Ebrahim Ravat, then known throughout the Waterberg simply as “Abram Koelie”.

Descendants of Ravat told me that besides supplying Marais with opium, he took the drug himself – which may partly account for the hefty prices (up to 20 golden sovereigns for a pound of opium) he charged.

Rietfontein was visited from time to time by Ou Hendrik, a wandering Bushman (or San). Marais listened to his tales and transmuted them into Dwaalstories , a slim and unforgettable collection.

They are unique, for in them, it seems to me, Marais somehow managed to glimpse from the inside the Khoisan world of myth and fantasy as it still existed in the early 1900s. No other writer has succeeded in doing this.

Some 4km west of Rietfontein lay Welgevonden, home of old Van Deventer, whose daughter-in-law, Hessie, Marais induced by means of hypnosis to “walk” after a paralysis of 17 years.

When I was last in the Waterberg there was still a drif called Hessie-se-water. This was where Hessie had got off the ox-wagon after a furious quarrel with her husband, Jossie, and declared “I will not walk again”.

The paralysis of her legs had been psychosomatic.

Beyond Welgevonden one could pass through Bokpoort and reach the true Waterberg, a deeply scarred region of ravines and krantzes. Here, at the foot of the Hangklip mountain on the Palala Plateau, on the farm Purekrans, lived Piet van Rooyen, brother of Gys, not far from the source of the Palala River. Marais went there to treat Oom Piet’s illness, and this is where he met the old man’s son, Hans Purekrans van Rooyen, who became his lifelong friend.

Sixteen years after the publication of Die Groot Verlange, Marais’ life story, I began a fresh investigation (published as Eugène Marais and the Darwin Syndrome) into Marais’ importance as a pioneering ethologist. I concluded that it was mainly the long-delayed publication of The Soul of the Ape which denied him the fame that was his due.

In 1948, 12 years after Marais’ death, Tinbergen reformulated Marais’ extremely important concept of the phyletic (inborn) and causal (acquired) memory.

Thirteen years later still, in 1961, Washburn and De Vore published a lengthy article, “The social life of baboons”, in the Scientific American. Though some of their observations were contested, they were feted as the first serious observers of baboons in the wild (meaning not in captivity), a title which surely Marais had earned 50 years before. His notes on baboon behaviour in The Soul of the Ape are regarded as honest and reliable by modern ethologists.

When The Soul of the Ape was finally published in 1969, it was too late.

Four years later Von Frisch, Lorenz and Tinbergen shared the Nobel prize for medicine and physiology for having opened a new field of science, ethology.

The name of Eugène Marais, pioneering ethologist, was not mentioned. But a time came in Marais’ life that he did not care a hoot about such matters.

Marais has now been dead for 64 years. None of the buildings on Rietfontein remain – perhaps not even their ruins.

Oom Gys and Tant Maria, their children and even many of their grandchildren have long passed away. Yet the old farm springs to life as fresh as the morning sunrise in one of Marais’ best-known poems:

Wanneer dit reën op Rietfontein
en deur die stof ‘n straal van groen verskyn…
dan sit oom Gysbert op die stoep alleen
Hy adem sag die geur
gemeng van stof en reën…
Van agter uit die groot kombuis
Kom daar aanhoudend die gesuis
Van kole op die vuurherd aangeblaas
Van pot en pan die klinkende geraas -
Dis net so seker as die boek,
Tant Malie bak nou pannekoek!

Rietfontein, the Waterberg itself, lives today partly because Eugène Marais was there.

Rousseau is the author of The Dark Stream, the Story of Eugene Marais, originally published as Die Groot Verlange.