South Africans will now be able to access digital recordings of the Rivonia trial, which saw Nelson Mandela as well as other anti-apartheid activists sentenced to life in jail.
According to the Sunday Times, the Department of Arts and Culture reached an agreement with France's National Audiovisual Institute to digitise the court proceedings of the Rivonia trial.
Specialist engineers in France were in charge of the digitisation, restoration and indexing of the recordings, making them available to ordinary South Africans.
Brenda Kotze, audiovisual archivist at Department of Arts and Culture, said the process to digitise the recordings had been in the pipeline for many years.
"We have been approaching different countries to assist us with the technology of getting this information out there," said Kotze.
For decades, the only audio recordings of the proceedings of the Rivonia trial lay dormant and deteriorating at the National Archives as the medium on which they were recorded, the Dictabelt, had been rendered obsolete. The machinery required to play them became redundant in the 1970s, reports the publication.
Besides the transcripts, there are no other recordings and no film footage of the proceedings of the Rivonia trial.
The digitised recordings will be officially handed over on Thursday at the Palace of Justice in Pretoria.
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