[Source - Chloe Rushovich for FHYA using Wits materials and material written by Carolyn Hamilton, 2022: In 1985, an oral history project was established at the National Archives in Lobamba in eSwatini. This project set about assembling already recorded data from a variety of sources; identifying gaps in this data and setting up new interviews to fill these gaps; and cataloguing, indexing, and processing these oral materials.
The oral history project ultimately consisted of interviews recorded by Isaac Dlamini dating from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, commissioned by the Swazi king, Sobhuza II; interviews recorded between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, recorded by Dumisa Dlamini for the Swaziland Broadcasting Services; and interviews recorded by academic researcher Philip Bonner in 1970, with the assistance from the Department of Local Administration, as well as individuals close to the Swazi king, significantly uMntwanenkhosi Makhungu, Mangangeni Dlamini, and Hilda Kuper; and interviews recorded by academic researcher Carolyn Hamilton in 1983, as a part of her graduate research. The project transcribed, translated into English, and annotated a selection of these interviews to facilitate research into Swazi history. An initial index of this material was also created.
The Swaziland Oral History Project material was ultimately moved to the custody of the Historical Papers Research Archive, at the University of the Witwatersrand (also known as the Wits Historical Papers). The index of this material was re-compiled by Ruth Muller in 2015 for Historical Papers, using Five Hundred Year Archive (FHYA) project funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the National Research Foundation.
In 2014, the FHYA commissioned Patricia Liebetrau, a metadata specialist and librarian, to undertake the digitization of a selection of the handwritten and typed transcripts from the Swaziland Oral History Project recordings. The transcripts initially selected were those for which a typed-up summary or typed edited typescript already existed. The rationale for this was that the typed version, unlike the handwritten versions, could be subjected to optical character recognition and are thus searchable. The linked typed texts therefore act as a kind of index to the handwritten texts and the recorded audio.
This selection of transcripts, as well as the already digitized audio, and associated materials such as collection boxes, index cards, folders, audio tape cassettes and case labels, and notebooks, formed the initial FHYA selection from the Swaziland Oral History Project, along with the experimental edited typescripts made by Carolyn Hamilton and Ronette Engela in the late 1980s to early 1990s.
In 2018, the FHYA commissioned digitisation service providers, First Coast, to digitise the remaining Swaziland Oral History Project jotters, folder covers, cassettes and inserts, index cards and boxes, and added this material to the FHYA curation of the selection of the Swaziland Oral History Project holdings at the Wits Historical Papers. This was further augmented by Carolyn Hamilton’s research materials relating to the project. The FHYA organized all of the aforementioned material into 'series', with each series being named after the primary interviewer or interviewing body, of the work, with additional series for organisational material and institutional material.]
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