The Soul of the Ape, Eugène N. Marais

Eugène Nielen Marais (1876-1936) was an important South African writer in the Second Language Movement of Afrikaans literature. Besides being a writer, Marais was also a naturalist. He is a pioneer of Ethology – the scientific study of animals. The Soul of the Ape is one of his most well-known works in this field, which was written in the early 1920s and published posthumously for this first time in 1969. It is a fascinating study of a troop of chacma baboons, which Marais lived in close proximity to, and observed their behaviour for approximately three years.