Trans4m Communiversity Associates – Reinventing Knowledge Communally

Kumusha is the Shona term for the rural homestead, where people are connected with the soil and their livelihoods primarily depend on the soil and hence, they call themselves “vana vevhu” meaning the children of the soil. Vana vevhu was a term that was used to motivate the Black people to fight for liberation against the colonial regime, with the main objective of reclaiming the land from the white settlers. Kumusha is where the majority of Black Zimbabweans stay and are buried when they die, they live on the soil when alive and continue to live under the soil when they die. The soil is the Black people’s key inheritance and heritage.

~ Integral Kamusha: Daud Shumba Taranhike ~

From our integral developmental perspective, unlike “development” or “modernisation”, regeneration starts from within.

There is little place for the atomised self, the lone scholar ploughing a solitary furrow of intellectual, research and endeavour. My contrast learning is as much a matter of socialization and acculturation.

Who are we

Trans4m Communiversity Associates (TCA) is an innovative new global venture that combines the best of co-creative consultancy, with an analytical edge that assists in transforming your local society. Developed over forty years, through the work of Trans4m, TCA offers tools and techniques for releasing what we call a Communiversity. That is a local learning space for liberating the DNA of your culture, so that people generate new ways of releasing their potential, economically, socially, culturally and communally.

We draw substantively upon Ecological and Anthropological, Economic and Business Studies each set within a Southern, Eastern, Northern or Western context, in theory and also in practice.

TCA Vision & Purpose

We believe that every person, every society, every culture is unique and has specific contributions to make to societal growth in association with other cultures and societies. And that challenges we face in the present century can also be overcome when we all join hands locally and globally, collectively and institutionally to confront the challenges.

Process & Structure

Trans4m Communiversity Associates (TCA), with its four-fold approach (community, sanctuary, academy and laboratory) is a catalyst and driver to sustainable and integral approach to social, economic, technological and cultural innovation in every society, through collaboration with individuals and institutions in every continent towards the regeneration of societies.

Our Communiversity has a fourfold structure of:

Grounding in Community, defined by particular social and economic boundaries
Emerging Local Core Values and Spirituality (what we term the ‘Pilgrimium’)
Navigating through a Research Academy, using culturally appropriate Research Methodologies, Systems and Processes
Effecting a series of Co-Laboratories, with the purpose of generating enterprises, in business, arts, science, culture and the social economy, that meet local needs.

Learning Community

Building a Learning Community through Integral Development by cultivating ongoing learning-full relationships between you and your immediate communities, organisations and societies.

Socio-Economic Laboratory

Social/Economic Exchange-&-Conversation through Integral Enterprise promoting Self Sufficiency via an Integral Economy

Developmental Pilgrimium

Identify and regenerate a community’s or society’s ‘seat of creativity’ as a cultural and spiritual foundation

Research Academy

Undertaking Participatory Action Research via Integral Research by producing and diffusing new knowledge.

Our Board Members

Prof Ronnie Lessem

Co-founder & Chief Research Coordinator

Fr. (Dr) Anselm Adodo

Pan-African Research & Development Coordinator

Rev Tony Bradley

Learning Consultant

Aneeqa Malik

Managing Partner & Co-creator

About The Book

What kind of knowledge do we need to survive in the present century and next?

Do the current modes of knowledge creation and application address the challenges of the 21st century? How do we bridge the dichotomy between being and knowing, research and innovation, theory and practice? Perhaps for the first time, a group of scholars—a veteran Afro-European political philosopher, a Catholic cleric and social scientist, and an Anglican priest/political economist—have taken a step further and asked: is it possible to re-imagine and re-invent the global university system?