Between 1916 and 1928, the Medical Officer of South West Africa (SWA), Dr Louis Fourie, collected what was to become one of the largest ethnographic collections of Bushman material culture in the world. The collection comprises around 3 500 artefacts, more than 300 photographs, and numerous files of notes, correspondence, literature and other archival material. The majority of the collection is now housed at Museum Africa (MA) in Johannesburg and is unique not only in its volume but also for its well-documented provenance – collected in just over a decade, from mostly named groups and territories within what is today Namibia.

Although Fourie was an amateur ethnographer, he was in close contact with many of the Khoisan experts and researchers of his time (Wanless 2007, 22, 83). As part of the colonial administration by profession, he was in a good position to facilitate the research of numerous other scholars who wished to come to SWA for their studies (Wanless 2007, 89). This included Dorothea Bleek and James Drury from the South African Museum (SAM) in Cape Town, and AJH Goodwin of the SAM and the University of Cape Town. Fourie and Louis Péringuey (of the SAM) also corresponded regularly, and Péringuey's interest in the physical anthropology of the Bushmen might have motivated Fourie's efforts to measure and photographically record the Bushman body (Wanless 2007, 21). Fourie's published work (1926, 1928), two articles focusing on the customs of the Hei-//om, has also been heavily referred to by other scholars, Alan Barnard naming him ‘their leading ethnographer’ (Barnard 1992, 214). However, Fourie's main efforts, the collection of thousands of artefacts and the information he compiled about them, have for the most part remained hidden in museum storerooms.

The most informative and comprehensive work on Fourie and his collection is Ann Wanless's 2007 PhD dissertation (‘The Silence of Colonial Melancholy: The Fourie Collection of Khoisan Ethnologica’). Wanless worked for many years at MA, where the Fourie collection has been stored since it was transferred from the Museum of Man and Science (MMS) in 1978 (Wanless 2007, 16). She was part of the staff that received and incorporated the collection into the MA and, in her thesis, has worked with the different media of the collection in its entirety as an archive (Wanless 2007, 47).