Imagine an evening, during the school holidays in July 1946, on Slang (“snake”), a farm in the bushveld. By the light of a kerosene lamp, a young woman reads aloud from a beige hardcover book. Gathered around her are three boys and a girl. They all sit on a spread out blanket on the cement floor close to her. With the wind howling round the corners of the farmhouse, she could not have chosen a more suitable night to introduce the children to Eugène Marais’ mesmerising story- telling. Awestruck, they take in the events of the stormy night in Die Huis van die Vier Winde from the identically titled book of short stories, first printed in 1933. The young woman reads from the eighth edition, which is an indication of the writer’s popularity among Afrikaans-speaking readers. By the end of the vacation the young listeners have lived through the trials and tribulations of Marais’ characters. Exposure to a world where supernatural manifestations (Die Huis van die Vier Winde), unravelling of riddles (Isaak Slyk), greed, and cut-throat plotting (Die Spookbul van Farellone) as well as hereditary madness (Die Vlieënde Hollander) interchange to capture the imaginations of the young listeners, to open their minds and awake in them a passion for reading.
In the vein of Pedro van der Poel of Die Vlieënde Hollander, Marais ends his life on March 29 1936. He shoots himself on a friend’s farm, Pelindaba, near Pretoria. Ironically, the name of the farm means “the end of the story”. When Paul de Ridder, the renowned doctor of the short story, grasps Pedro’s malady, Marais lifts the curtain on his own pain that he is to stop three years later:
“‘n Mens verdra dikwels ‘n halwe leeftyd lank die vreeslikste liggaamlike pyn sonder dat die gedagte ooit opkom om verlossing the soek deur die hand aan die eie lewe te slaan, terwyl pyniging van hierdie aard — sielepyn — een van die gewoonste oorsake van selfmoord onder alle volke en beskawings is.” (Which means roughly that one often bears unbearable pain for half a lifetime without ever considering suicide as a solution. Yet this pain of the soul is one of the most common causes of suicide among all nations.)
Human & Rousseau has recently reprinted in paperback the complete works of Marais, comprising two volumes, Eugène N Marais — Versamelde werke, edited by Marais’ biographer, Leon Rousseau; The Soul of the Ape, The Soul of the White Ant and Dwaalstories.
Marais is honoured and respected for his ground-breaking research into animal behaviour and his keen observations of the termitary. According to his English translator, Winifred de Kock, he “would wish to be remembered for his lifelong study of termites and apes”. But for the girl who listened to Die Huis van die Vier Winde he lives on as the prose-poet, the teller of tales that conjure up worlds of make-believe.
Surely it must have been this ability- that led the Belgian Nobel Prize- winner, Maurice Maeterlinck, astray when he plagiarised Marais’ ode to life: Die Siel van die Mier (The Soul of the Ant). Marais wrote the definitive article on his field study of white ants for Die Huisgenoot in 1925 and Maeterlinck published La Vie des Termites in 1927. (Apart from the Dutch, the Flemish also read Afrikaans.) If it is true that Maeterlinck never studied a real termitary, the subliminal impact of the Die Siel van die Mier is evident. Who can remain aloof at Marais’ description of the marriage flight, the king’s devotion to the queen, birth pain and mother-and-child bonding, the magic fungi gardens, the “aqueducts” and the clay walls of the termitary as metaphor for the human skin?
Drought and the subsequent encroaching of the desert are motifs that thread through Marais’ writings. Apart from a clinical analysis of the causes for this looming disaster in Die Verwoestingsgang van Droogte, he describes the suicidal flight of the Hereros out of Namibia, away from German domination, and into the Waterberg (Die Woestynvlug van die Herero’s). In Ondergang van die Tweede Wêreld he conjures up a hair-raising scenario of the plight for survival when lack of water causes the collapse of civic services.
Blatantly treacherous is the killing of Pretoria’s non-European population by edict of the city’s council. In this story Marais exposes the vile and barbarous face of white supremacy. On the contrary there is also another story, Die Lied van die Reën (“‘n Koranna-dwaalstorie“) with its reassuring account of the equal and peaceful distribution of water and livelihood when the first rain falls. In this “wandering tale” it is the artist, Krom Joggom Konterdans, who saves his people when he plays the song of the rain on the violin he crafted according to time-honoured tradition. This song invites dancing, annihilates rivalry and accordingly breaks the drought.
Whereas Marais’s acquaintance with Konterdans is by means of oral history, he belongs in the fictive realm of Hendrik, the old storyteller of the Waterberg.
On the other hand, Jan Nel, a big-game hunter, introduced Marais to Klaas, the renowned blacksmith also of the Waterberg. He met Klaas at his workshop. In “‘n Klein Kerkops en sy Werk” Marais records this man’s craft, which is long extinct. Among Klaas’s tools, Marais’ eye was caught by the design of the spoon that Klaas crafted. The simple curve of the handle was both decorative and functional. But above all this man’s knowledge of animals and their behaviour amazed Marais. It surpassed his own and even that of Jan Nel, because Klaas “lived their lives and reflected their thoughts”.
The girl who listened to Die Huis van die Vier Winde in 1946, read Diep Rivier several years later on the same farm. What intrigued her then was the mysterious confluence of emotional and enigmatic currents as symbolised by the occurrence of the mamba, but above all Marais’ significant poem Diep Rivier. (In fact it is the love song of Juanita Perreira, the tragic heroine in the story.) And after all these years what does another reading of Diep Rivier present? The immense pain caused by racial degradation.
Juanita, the beautiful mulatto girl can never love the white boy of her youth. Racial restraints prohibit the flowering of their relationship because he is the white heir of the farm where she, the bastard, was raised and treated like family. Eventually the heir marries a similarly lovely white woman and obviously Juanita, being the servant, is pained. When a child is born she nurses it and ultimately “possesses” it as her own. Yet the biological mother is a fact as well as the man who Juanita loves. At this stage Marais’ storytelling carries on into a novel of recent times. Agaat, by Marlene van Niekerk, deals with a similar social predicament: the life of an adopted bastard child, who works for a white family. Limitless is the make-believe world of storytelling.
Prophet of the Waterberg, a play by Nicky Rebelo about Eugène Marais, is running at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg
Spirit of Eugène Marais brought to the stage
The question should probably be what relevance the life of Afrikaans advocate, writer, junkie, scientist and charlatan Eugène Marais has to our lives as South Africans right now. And the answer could possibly be, very little.
Or it could be that it only pertains to certain whites in the sense that, apart from being very much a product of but also very much ahead of his times, Marais was also completely out of step with them.
But what the play Prophet of the Waterberg calmly and intelligently manages to do is both stimulate our interest in Marais and convey the sense that a life lived and suffered always overlaps our own. It is up to us to infer the rest.
Hell, one could also just watch it for Dawid Minnaar’s superlative performance as he veers from the flirty, playful naturalist who delights in imparting knowledge to the haunted metaphysician staring at the abyss on all fronts.
Writer-director Nicky Rebelo uses an interesting conceit to get a screenwriter (David Butler) camping in the Waterberg with his reluctant teenage daughter (Bianca Clarke). Here they encounter the spirit, idea or hallucination of Marais.
If there is any criticism to be made, it’s that Butler’s Mike le Roux doesn’t seem to wrestle so much with Marais in terms of his script as with Marais in terms of his own baggage.
Starting as an angry character he can only go to very angry, and his howl of anguish is the only false note in a somewhat long and didactic play. A lost, disappointed look would have been sufficient to convey exactly what teenagers can do to parents.
Anyway, it all builds towards one of Marais’ last essays, a piece of racist paranoia by a man short of a fix, a loved one or recognition for the work that was plagiarised by Nobel prize-winner Maurice Maeterlinck.
Well written, acted and designed, it was sad but not surprising to see so few people at the second-night performance of such a good play. — Neil Sonnekus
Reading matters
Writing is not a competitive activity, but the proliferation of competitions and awards has seemingly made it so by default. Nominees were announced last week for South Africa’s most lucrative literary events, the Alan Paton Non-Fiction Award and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, which each boast a winner’s purse of R50 000.
The fiction prize pits Nobel laureate and double Booker winner JM Coetzee (Slow Man from Secker & Warburg) against fellow veteran André Brink (Praying Mantis, also Secker & Warburg), Andrew Brown (Coldsleep Lullaby, Zebra Press) and debut novelists Russel Brownlee (Garden of the Plagues, Human & Rousseau) and Consuelo Roland (The Good Cemetery Guide, Double Storey).
In the Alan Paton, finalists are The Dirty Work of Democracy by Antony Altbeker (Jonathan Ball Publishers); Witness to AIDS by Edwin Cameron (Tafelberg); AidSafari by Adam Levin (Zebra Press; No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer by Ronald Suresh Roberts (STE Publishers) and Spring Will Come by William N Zulu (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press).
While these two awards lead the field in pure rand terms, it’s notable that the monies for short-story competitions far exceed them in rands per word or per page. Mischievous though this calculation may be, consider the evidence. The annual HSBC/SA Pen Literary Award for short stories by emerging Southern African writers under the age of 40 has a first prize of $5Â 000 (more than R30Â 000), a second of $3Â 000 and a third of $2Â 000 — in total, $10Â 000 (more than R60Â 000).
Then there’s the forthcoming BTA/Anglo Platinum Short Story Competition 2006, which will award a total of R65Â 000 — and platinum jewellery. The winner here will receive R25Â 000; first runner-up R15Â 000; second runner-up R12Â 000; and third runner-up R8Â 000. There will be a R5Â 000 prize for the best children’s story. Jewellery, by the way, will be given out at the judges’ discretion.
Entries for the BTA/Anglo Platinum are required to be between 4 500 and 5 000 words, so the winner will earn about R5 per word — oh, if only all novelists and writers of non-fiction books could be similarly paid! (Of course, many novelists are: Dan Brown, Wilbur Smith, Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham et al; and on the non-fiction side, Stephen Hawking, Simon Schama, et cetera.)
Get writing, because entries close on June 30. Submissions may be typed or handwritten and, say the organisers, “the competition does not disqualify writers for imperfect grammar or spelling as long as the story is interesting”. More information is available at www.angloplatshortstory.com.
These rich rewards for writers of short stories would have pleased Herman Charles Bosman. He received two or three guineas per thousand words — a guinea being £1,05, about R11 — and reflected wryly on such circumstances in his essay The South African Short Story Writer. Those entering various competitions these days would do well to read this Bosman — it’s in Old Transvaal Stories, edited by Craig MacKenzie, published by Human & Rousseau in 2000. — Darryl Accone