[Source – Debra Pryor for FHYA, 2023, using public process documents: In 2013, Prof. Carolyn Hamilton inaugurated the Five Hundred Year Archive (FHYA) project for the creation of an on-line digital archive exemplar pertinent to the history of the southern Africa in the late independent era, that is, the five hundred years or so before European colonialism. The aim of the exemplar is to develop a way of convening online a host of different materials (oral, documentary, artefactual, physical), relevant to this period, drawn from a variety of institutions and individuals in the region and internationally. One of these was the Swaziland Oral History project.
The FHYA undertook the digitization of the transcripts and has arranged for these, as well as a copy of the digitized audio, to be deposited at the Swazi National Archives (ie: the second copy of the digitized audio to be placed in a Swaziland repository). The FHYA further paid for an archivist, Ruth Muller to expand the existing Wits Historical Papers finding aid to the collection, which was shared with the Swazi National Archives.
While publication and researcher access was understood by the permission-granting authorities involved in the original recordings, to be a likely outcome of the fieldwork, digital availability was not imagined in the 1970s and 1980s.
For this reason, the FHYA resolved to undertake a public process to make known as widely as possible the proposed digitization effort, to register and deal with any concerns by surviving interviewees. This created an opportunity for them to exclude their interviews from the digitization process, or to place any limitations necessary on the use of the interviews, as well as to promote public knowledge and understanding of the materials.
To this end the FHYA commissioned a historian, Dr. Nhlanhla Dlamini, of the University of Swaziland, to design and run the public process. Work by Dr. Dlamini commenced in November 2015 and continued to the end of February 2016. The Public Process designed by Dr. Dlamini comprised three elements: The involvement in the process of the Swaziland National Archives in their role as the custodians of the national archival estate; an extensive media campaign; a stakeholders meeting and seminar.
This series includes documents, articles, correspondence and a report pertinent to these processes undertaken to engage with a public permissions process before digitizing and making the collection available online.]
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