The Fourie collection of Khoisan ethnographica: forming an archive

Abstract

In the 1920s, in the course of exercising control over the furthest reaches of South Africa’s recently acquired protectorate, Dr Louis Fourie, Medical Officer for the Administration of the Protectorate of South West Africa, amassed what was to become probably the world’s most extensive collection of Khoisan artefacts. Today the results of this decade of part‐time collecting and anthropologising form a neglected source of knowledge as it rests in the storerooms of Museum Africa in Johannesburg. Fourie and his collection formed an important part of the process of a discourse that created knowledge about the Khoisan over the subsequent decades, both shaping and being shaped by the academic paradigms of his time and the colonial perceptions and imperatives that informed policy and practice in the Administration. This recursive pattern continued as the collection moved in and out of public institutions, reflecting a continuing obsession with the Khoisan in the West, both in public and academic discourses. Examining the collection, its history and its context uncover seldom distinguished characteristics of archives and, particularly of, mixed‐media collections.