FHYA curation of a selection from the Royal House of Dlamini Series of the Swaziland Oral History Project

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[Source - Chloe Rushovich for FHYA using Wits materials, 2017: In the mid-1960s King Sobhuza II commissioned a series of interviews about the history of Swaziland. These interviews were conducted across the length and breadth of Swaziland from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. They embrace a range of historical topics, notably the origins of the people of Swaziland, as well as the origins of its many chieftaincies. These interviews display a strong regional emphasis, and were conducted, in part, as a part of a program undertaken by the Swazi monarchy for the recovery and reinvigoration of Swaziland's customs and traditions in the 1960s and 1970s. The transcripts 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. In 2014 the Five Hundred Year Archive commissioned Patricia Liebetrau, a metadata librarian who had worked on the Digital Imaging South Africa project, to undertake the digitization of a selection of the transcripts from the recordings made by Isaac Dlamini for the Royal House of Dlamini. This selection of transcripts, as well as the already digitized audio, the rejected experimental edited typescripts, and associated materials such as folders, audio tape cassettes and case labels, and notebooks, formed the FHYA selection from the collection of Royal House of Dlamini recordings. The Royal House of Dlamini series is separated into 'files' named after each interlocutor.]