Avoiding those who have plenty of biographies already written, I would go immediately to Eugène Marais, a South African poet, writer, and naturalist who published only in Afrikaans and is little known as a result. He can stand in the literary world alongside any of the great Afrikaans writers but deserves more to be known for his studies of baboons (he lived with a troop of baboons for years and could be referred to as the South African Jane Goodall) and termites. He it was who first proposed the theory that a termite colony could be regarded as a living organism since the termites performed functions that occur within the body of a living creature. His book regarding this (The Soul of the White Anthttps://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/Marais1/whiteantToC.html) is available on the net, presumably because long out of copyright.
Since the theory was stolen and is now usually credited to Maurice Maeterlinck, it's about time we set the record straight.
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