Shosholoza

Shosholoza is a song the soon to be formed Open Door Singers Diamond Valley choir is currently learning. It has its origins as an Ndebele folk song from Zimbabwe and has become so popular in South African culture that it has been adopted as South Africa's second national anthem.

The lyrics came from the heartache of working in the mines for encouragement as a sign of solidarity. The hidden meaning was to support the struggle against oppression and possibly represents a cry for the beloved country in the hills far away.  

The are many different lyrics but here is a sample with an approximate translation:

         Go forward

Go forward

from those mountains

on this train from South Africa

Go forward

Go forward

You are running away

You are running away

From those mountains

On this train from South Africa

What is it you believe but can’t prove ?

From an early age I developed the idea of the importance of good works and that simply believing in the “Christ” was insufficient if one was to attempt to encapsulate the spirit of what was meant in the age old message. I have since realized that such an assertion may also be somewhat simplistic, since stories have symbolic lessons which are not always clear to us today. However it still remains true to my belief to day.   
Here are a few responses from different people. Which one resonates with you?
Jared Diamond –Evolutionary biologist and professor of geography at UCLA, author and Pulitzer Prize winner with extensive field experience in North America, South America, Africa, Asia , Australia and New Guinea.
When did humans complete their expansion around the world? I ‘m convinced , but can’t yet prove, that humans first reached the continents of North America, South Americas, and Australia only very recently-during or near the end of the last Ice Age. Specifically I’m convinced they reached North America around 14,000 years ago, South America around 13,500 years ago and Australia and New Guinea around 46,000 years ago. And that within a few centuries of those dates humans were responsible for the extinction of most of the big animals of those continents.

Anton Zeilinger. Professor of physics at the University of Vienna.
Once you adopt the notion that reality and information are rather the same, all quantum paradoxes and puzzles like Schrödinger’s cat disappear. Note the price of reconciliation is high. If my hypothesis is true, many questions become meaningless. There is no sense asking what is going on out there. Schrödinger’s cat is neither dead nor alive unless we obtain information about its state. By the way, I also believe that the day will come when we learn to overcome “de coherence” and to observe quantum phenomenon outside the shielded environment of Labourites. I hope that (unlike the unexamined cat) I will be alive when this happens.

Carolyn Porco-Planetary scientist.
We may soon discover life-forms under the ice on some moon orbiting Jupiter or Saturn or decide the intelligible signals of an advanced, unreachable distant alien civilisation.

J Craig Ventor –Visionary Genomic Researcher. Our human centric view of life is clearly unwarranted. From the millions of genes we are continually discovering in all our organisms, we learn that a finite number of genes appear over and over again and could easily have evolved from a few microbes arriving in a meteor or in intergalactic dust.

Leon lederman -Nobel Prize Winer in Physics 1988.
To believe something while knowing that it cannot be proved (yet) is the essence of physics. Guys like Einstein, Dirac, Poncare, extolled the beauty of concepts, in a bizarre sense placing truth at a lower level of importance.

Maria Spiropula -Experimental physicist.
I believe nothing to be true if it cannot be proved.
My hunch (and my wish) is that in the laboratory we will be able to segment space-time so finely that gravity will be studied and understood in a confined environment –and that gravitational particle physics will become recognised field.

David G Myers-Professor of psychology at Hope College, in Michigan
The mix of faith based humility and scepticism helped fuel the beginning of modern science and it has informed my own research and writing. The whole truth cannot be found merely by searching our minds, for there is not enough there. So we must put our ideas to the test. If they survive, so much the better for them; if not. So much the worse.

Jonathan Haidt Associate professor in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia.
If psychologists took religious experience seriously and tried to understand it from the inside, as anthropologists did in studying other cultures, I believe it would enrich our science. I have found religious texts and testimonials about purity and pollution essential for understanding the emotion of disgust and for helping me to see the breadth of moral concerns beyond harm, rights and justice.

David Buss Professor in the Psychology Department of the University Of Texas at Austin.
I believe in true love. The road of ordinary love are well travelled and their markers are well understood- the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, the often profound self-sacrifice, the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course, through unchartered territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It’d difficult to define. Eludes modern measurement, seems scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists. I just can’t prove it.

Quotes taken from John Brockman’s book entitled “What We Believe but Cannot Prove”.

  

The Lion King 2 - He Lives In You

We are learning this song "He Lives in You" from the "Lion King" from a varied musical repertoire of the newly formed project to establish a local community choir. 

Hence the "Open  Door Singers Diamond Valley" is in the early formative stages but nevertheless the format and music in the first month has been enthusiastically adopted by locals. This is in no small part due to the expert direction of the accomplished singer and acclaimed choral conductor Shaun Islip. 

Shaun is the Musical Director of the not for profit organisation "Open  Door  Singers" which aims to foster and grow community choirs. It seems very likely the "Open  Door Singers Diamond Valley" will become a future reality as members elect to join.
 
The words to the song are as follows :

 

Ingonyama nengw' enamabala
Ingonyama nengw' enamabala

Night and the spirit of life calling
Oh, oh, iyo, mamela
And the voice with the fear of a child answers
Iyo iyo, mamela

Wait, there's no mountain too great
Hear these words and have faith
Oh, oh, iyo
Have faith

Hela hey mamela, hela hey mamela
Hela hey mamela, hela hey mamela

He lives in you, he lives in me
He watches over everything we see
Into the waters, into the truth
In your reflection, he lives in you

Dream, and the voice in the wind whispers
Iyo mamela

Wait, there's no mountain too great
Hear these words and have faith, oh, oh, iyo

He lives in you, he lives in me
He watches over everything we see
Into the waters, into the truth
In your reflection, he lives in you

Ingonyama nengw' enamabale
Ingonyama nengw' enamabale

He lives in you, he lives in me
He watches over everything we see
Into the water, into the truth
In your reflection, he lives in you

He lives in you, oh yeah, he lives in me
He watches over everything we see
Into the water, into the truth
In your reflection, he lives, he lives, he lives, he lives in you
He lives, he lives, he lives in you
He watches over everything we see

Songwriters
Jay Rifkin;Mark Mancina;Lebo Morake

Published by
WONDERLAND MUSIC COMPANY, INC.;WALT DISNEY MUSIC COMPANY