Accounting at the Margins of Protest: A Decolonial Reflexive Narrative of #RhodesMustFall

This paper marks the ten-year anniversary of the #RhodesMustFall movement by presenting a collective reflection on its enduring influence within the accounting profession and accounting education in South Africa. As four Black African women academics who held varied personal and professional positions during the 2015 protests, from students and trainee accountants to emerging scholars, we reflect on how the movement disrupted institutional cultures, illuminated epistemic injustices and exposed the colonial matrix of power, knowledge, and being embedded in South African accounting education. Although accounting scholarship has begun to engage with global social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, little attention has been paid to African-led decolonial struggles such as #RhodesMustFall, particularly from reflective voices within the accounting academy. Grounded in Decolonial Theory, our reflections interrogate how entrenched knowledge hierarchies continue to marginalise African epistemologies in accounting education, sustain accounting’s presentation as a neutral and technical discipline removed from broader social realities, and illustrate the value of lived experience as a site of knowledge production. By drawing on our positionalities, we critically examine the role accounting played during moments of social upheaval, including the discipline's detachment from protest, and the silences of accountability that accompanied them. In doing so, we contribute to the emergent body of decolonial scholarship in accounting and argue that unsettling dominant epistemic frameworks not only advances decolonial aims but also strengthens the pursuit of inclusive and equitable education.