Eugène Nielen Marais (/ˈjuːdʒiːn mɑːˈreɪ/; 9 January 1871 – 29 March 1936) was a South African lawyer, naturalist, and important writer and poète maudit in the Second Language Movement of Afrikaans literature.

[2] After leaving school, he worked in Pretoria as a legal clerk and then as a journalist before becoming owner (1891, at the age of twenty) of a newspaper called Land en Volk (Country and (the Afrikaner) People).

[4] Marais married Aletta "Lettie" Beyers (1871–1895), about whom he wrote in a letter to a friend: "She is just about the most perfect female in body and mind that God ever planted in South Africa."

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.

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 (the result of ten years of hard labour in the veld) by his own unaided reason, although he admits that he never saw a termite in his life.

[4]: 398 [9]: 53  Supported by a coterie of Afrikaner Nationalist friends, Marais sought justice through the South African press and attempted an international lawsuit.

Marais brooded at the time of the scandal: "I wonder whether Maeterlinck blushes when he reads such things [critical acclaim], and whether he gives a thought to the injustice he does to the unknown Boer worker?

"[8] 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.

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.".

Marais also collected a very large store of African folklore in the Waterberg District from an elderly San storyteller locally nicknamed Ou Hendrick.

A. J. Louw, an Afrikaner Calvinist dominee known as "The Pope of the Highveld", confronted Marais during a haus bezoek, or ministerial visitation, for believing in Darwinian evolution.

"[11] One of Marais's last poems, Diep Rivier ("Deep River"), is an ode to the drug morphine and was written ten years before its author's death by his own hand.

[11] On March 29, 1936, having been forsaken by his friends and family and deprived of morphine for several days, Marais borrowed a shotgun on the pretext of killing a snake and shot himself in the chest.

For those who are familiar with the dark moods of certain of Marais's poems, there is a black irony there; in Zulu language, Pelindaba means 'the end of the business' – although the more common interpretation is 'Place of great gatherings'.

At the beginning of his 1982 book, The Adversary Within: Dissident Writers in Afrikaans, Jack Cope explained that the famous confrontation between Eugène Marais and Rev.

[11] Many highly important figures in Afrikaans literature during the Apartheid felt similarly, according to André Brink, "torn between attachment to their language, situation, and people on the one hand and their desire to bring about innovations, which are rejected or misunderstood.

"[15] The following translation of Marais's "Winternag" is by J. W. Marchant: "Winter's Night" O the small wind is frigid and spareand bright in the dim light and bareas wide as God's merciful boonthe veld lies in starlight and gloomand on the high landsspread through burnt bandsthe grass-seed, astir, is like beckoning hands.O East-wind gives mournful measure to songLike the lilt of a lovelorn lass who's been wrongedIn every grass foldbright dewdrop takes holdand promptly pales to frost in the cold!

"Winternight" 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!