This was what Old Katje, the wife of a Bushman man living at Kuie Pan in the northern Cape, told police in January 1910, who were gathering evidence on the activities of a Mr Mehnarto, hired by the Austrian anthropologist Dr Rudolf Pöch to acquire Bushman human remains for him. In this case, and in numerous others, Mehnarto had dug up the graves of recently buried Bushmen, without the permission of their relatives. In at least one case he also exported to Austria recently buried corpses. Old Katje's husband's remains, and those of the numerous others, came to be housed in Vienna.

In May 1909 Pöch arrived in Kimberley (from South West Africa and Bechuanaland). He was given red carpet treatment by the South African authorities, from the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony down to magistrates and field-cornets. His purpose was to collect Bushman remains principally for the measurement of skulls in order to understand the ‘racial’ classification of human ‘types’ and their ‘prehuman’ ancestors. This work also sought to prove that people of colour were intellectually and morally inferior to whites, a line of thinking that later fed into Nazi racial thought and ideas of the inherent superiority of ‘Aryans’. In 1915 Pöch wrote that ‘[there] are primitive cultures which are separate from the highly developed ones of Europe…