The ambivalence of tradition and modernity in selected Southern Ndebele texts

Even though isiNdebele was only standardised in the early 1980s, the Southern Ndebele have managed to develop and produce a rich literary canon that is largely didactic as well as permeated with subtextual ambiguities. Nevertheless, this rich literary tradition has not stimulated much discourse given the fact that the last scholarly output in this regard was in the early 2000s. This article contributes towards filling this lacuna in South African literary studies by exploring how the tension between tradition and modernity is handled in selected Southern Ndebele texts, namely: Mbala ngubaba (‘Truly it is my father’), Larhwalala nobani? (‘Who is defeated?’), and Ngingewakabani? (‘To whom do I belong?’). Leveraging ambivalence as a device for literary criticism, the article contends that rather than a Manichean juxtaposition of these modalities, these texts present a picture wherein tradition and modernity exist as the obverse of one another, inviting us to abandon or look beyond a polarised description of reality.