The scientist who robbed the Kalahari of its dead

Editors Note: Unburied is a series by Minority Africa and ARC tracing how the theft of Indigenous remains in the Kalahari shaped race science—and how their descendants are demanding their return. See other stories in the series and listen to the podcast here. 

About two years ago at a dinner, the head curator of archeology Dr. Wendy Black from the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town told me about the most important thing she wanted to achieve in her tenure at the museum. She wanted to deal with the human remains she was responsible for. 

It wasn’t exactly a secret, but I was surprised to learn that  the museum has a storeroom with the remains of more than a thousand people—partial or full skeletons in cardboard boxes. Some are very old, but others are so young they could have been my grandparents.

Some have been de-accessioned, locked away in steel cabinets and made unavailable to researchers. These are the youngest skeletons—the ones the museum has declared “unethically obtained.” In other words: stolen. All of them are the remains of indigenous peoples of Southern Africa—mostly so-called San or Bushmen.

The question of naming highlights the sensitivity of the topic of the remains themselves. Because all words that describe the San or the Bushmen collectively are exonyms. Given to them by others. And while the term Bushmen long has been considered derogatory, some say they prefer to be called Bushmen instead of San, which is a term derived from the language Nama that some again find equally derogatory. The question of names is an unsettled debate and it highlights the extent of the cultural erasure the different indigenous communities at the heart of this story have suffered. In the museum the labelling of the remains makes it virtually impossible to establish the exact identities of the people whose bones are in the boxes, so it is difficult to say which exact communities they come from. For this project we aim to use the terms people themselves prefer.

It was the unethically collected skeletons that troubled Dr Wendy Black, the head curator responsible for the collection. For years, she has worked with indigenous communities in the Northern Cape of South Africa—where some of the remains were taken from—to rebury them. Dr Black approached us at the non-profit documentary company ARC, because of the connections we had made with communities in the Kalahari during the filming of our 2023 documentary !Aitsa.

Telling the story of the reburial was the original plan. We would follow the negotiations between the museum, communities, and government to document the efforts to return and rebury the remains of stolen ancestors. And that is still the plan. If all goes according to schedule, the remains from the Northern Cape will be reburied this year.

But once we began researching the project, we realised there was another story that needed to be told first: the story of Austrian anthropologist Dr Rudolf Pöch. Because the collection of human remains at the Iziko South African Museum only began in earnest after he had travelled through the Kalahari, taking the bones or bodies of more than 170 people.

Dr Pöch is a central figure in what became a frenzy of grave robbery in the Kalahari—not only because of the scale of his exploits, but also because he personifies the European colonial-era scientist. Celebrated in Europe for his anthropological collections, which—under scrutiny—turn out to have been gathered under extremely dubious circumstances.

By following in his footsteps, our ambition is to understand both what happened in the Kalahari and the circumstances that motivated Pöch and enabled him to take the remains of so many people.

Pöch was a product of the height of colonialism and nationalism in Europe. He was motivated by personal scientific ambition. The Austro-Hungarian Empire that funded his expedition was driven by a desire to acquire knowledge and resources that would give it an edge in the great imperialist contest of the colonial era. But what does all that have to do with bones? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

The early 20th century was the heyday of race science—a now completely discredited discipline used to justify white supremacy and provide a “scientific” basis for atrocities across the world. In essence, race scientists believed human evolution was hierarchical, with modern-day European man at the pinnacle.

The research they conducted to support these theories involved measuring, body casting, and highly invasive examinations of people they considered to be on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder. And at the bottom of that ladder, in their view, were the Aboriginal people of Australia and the Bushmen of the Kalahari. They measured people for hours, took photographs—often focusing especially on genitalia—and exhumed the graves of recently deceased individuals. Especially skulls and genital morphology were considered important in racial typology, determining the differences between races and establishing the racial hierarchies. This work again served to justify the colonial project.

The Bushmen were viewed as prehistoric and on the brink of extinction. This belief drove Rudolf Pöch’s urgency. Of course, it’s scientifically false and deeply misguided to consider living people “prehistoric.” But this kind of language has an even darker layer. The Bushmen were not passively “dying out” like endangered plants or animals. They were actively being killed in what Professor Mohamed Adhikari has described as “a genocide in slow motion.”

This had been ongoing for centuries when Rudolf Pöch arrived in the Kalahari. But German South West Africa, where he first landed, was then an active war zone and the site of an ongoing genocide. German forces were at war with the Nama and Herero. While the Bushmen were not involved in the conflict as an organised group, they were victimised in many ways.

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For example, their way of life was criminalised—labelled as vagrancy. Killings of Bushmen by white farmers often went unpunished.

Rudolf Pöch took advantage of this dire situation to create a vast collection of artefacts, film footage, audio recordings, and human remains. He claimed in reports that he met no resistance from the communities he encountered. But as we explore in the podcast, this is not true. In episode two of the podcast we examine some of the original audio recordings made by Pöch, where several people expressly condemn Pöch and his methods, often in languages that Pöch himself did not understand. In one example, a man named !Kxara berates Pöch for not sharing his food and taking his knife, an essential and valuable tool during a time of extreme scarcity.

Pöch sometimes travelled with armed military escorts during a genocidal war. This alone tipped the power balance so drastically that opposition would have been nearly impossible. He was armed himself, and would set up camp near waterholes in a drought-ridden desert, effectively making himself unavoidable to anyone who needed water. He hired local assistants, paying them to dig up graves—sometimes so freshly dug the bodies had not yet decayed. One of the assistants, a man named |Xosi Tshai, was a field expert sought out by at least two scientists who depended on him for navigating the difficult Kalahari terrain, but as he laments in one of the original field recordings, he was never paid for his services. Instead he was rented out by the farmer he worked for. 

Despite the unequal power dynamics that made resistance nearly impossible, some people did object. But none of this made an impression on Rudolf Pöch. His collection efforts intensified in the months leading up to his departure from South Africa in 1909.

The Austrian anthropologist remains relatively unknown in South Africa, and for most of the 20th century his legacy was celebrated in his home country. Thanks to the work of academics like Professor Ciraj Rassool, Professor Walter Sauer, Dr Anette Hoffmann and Dr Sophie Schasiepen—who are all interviewed in the podcast—Pöch’s legacy is no longer uncontested in Austria. But his collection at the Austrian Academy of Sciences is still praised, and a street in Vienna still bears his name.

In 2012, the remains of Klaas and Trooi Pienaar were returned to South Africa after extensive lobbying by activists and scholars. The Pienaars were taken before their bodies had decomposed and transported to Vienna in a barrel filled with salt. This meant that they were kept somewhat separate and were more easily identifiable than the others.Trooi and Klaas Pienaar were just two entries in Pöch’s inventory of 171 individuals. The rest of the unburied remains are still in Austria today.

Rasmus Bitsch and Neil Liddell are co-founders of ARC, a non-profit documentary company dedicated to creative non-fiction storytelling in audio and film. Their work examines power, memory, and identity through a social justice lens, uncovering hidden histories and the unknown connections that shape our world.

Edited/Reviewed by Caleb Okereke, Uzoma Ihejirika, Sarah Etim, and Kenneth Awom.