ABSTRACT
The Bushmen were the first group to be investigated by an expedition from the South African Museum, but the relationship turned sour when the administration thought that it had been financially shortchanged. The notion of Bushman reserves solely for the benefit of ethnologists was grounded in what some administrators and journalists felt were crass academic and scientific exploitation. Academics and scientists formed committees in Johannesburg and Cape Town to support the Bushman cause. Academic input on how Bushmen were treated was minimal or problematic. Professor Maingard, for example, raised the question of a Bushman reserve with the Historical Monuments Commission, where "there was a difference of opinion about whether the Bushmen should be regarded as human beings or as fauna. During the interwar period anthropologists studiously avoided trying to explain or understand what was happening to the Bushmen. Often explanations by nonanthropologists were at once more fantastic and accurate.
