A. Kayum Ahmed
Activist-Scholar || Author
New Release
Theorizing Fallism
Rhodes Must Fall and the Global Movement to Decolonize the University
In 2015, students at the University of Cape Town ignited a movement that would reverberate across the globe by demanding the removal of a statue of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes. What began as a protest against a single monument became Rhodes Must Fall: a confrontation with colonial legacies at South African universities that inspired a movement at Oxford and beyond.
​
A. Kayum Ahmed tells the powerful story of Rhodes Must Fall, tracing the emergence of a new decolonial framework, Fallism, and its trajectory from Africa to empire. Drawing on archival research and interviews with activists, he interprets Fallism as both a critique of the university—rooted in patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism—and a broader decolonial theory.
Ahmed reveals how students combined acts of defiance with deeper forms of intellectual insurgency to challenge Eurocentric curricula, linguistic hierarchies, and the silencing of Black epistemologies. In so doing, they transformed Black pain—the source of the uprising—into a collective struggle for Black liberation.
​
By following Fallism’s journey, this book demonstrates how student movements create new vocabularies of resistance that transcend geographies of power. It underscores why universities remain battlegrounds in global struggles, from conflicts over statues and curricula to pro-Palestinian protests. Both a history of a movement and a theoretical intervention, Theorizing Fallism illuminates the enduring influence of students to challenge entrenched structures of knowledge and power.
Order Now
Theorizing Fallism is a sweeping meditation on decolonial study and struggle, following students who force universities to confront their own contradictions. By centering movements across time and place, Ahmed exposes how universities pay lip service to critical inquiry while shutting down critique of the university itself—and how collective refusal turns campuses, classrooms, and encampments into sites of liberatory world-making. Essential reading for everyone who dares to imagine and demand another university.
Ruha Benjamin
Author of Imagination: A Manifesto
Praise & Reviews
Theorizing Fallism is a vital archive of how contemporary student movements rename, occupy, and reimagine space as theory. From Azania House at the University of Cape Town, to Columbia’s The People’s University, Ahmed shows students reconfiguring the university’s physical and ideological architecture, exposing institutional complicity while advancing alternative visions of education, solidarity, and justice beyond the university’s limits.
Simamkele Dlakavu
​author of Asijiki: Black Women in the Economic Freedom Fighters, Owning Space, Building a Movement
In Theorizing Fallism, Ahmed treats student movements as sites of knowledge production, linking Rhodes Must Fall to pro-Palestinian encampments that reclaim colonial space through public pedagogy. Framed as deliberate political projects rather than spontaneous eruptions, these movements reveal students’ generative power to exceed colonial imaginaries in the pursuit of a more just future.
Sueda Polat
Organizer, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD)
Fallism captures how student movements transform pain into real solidarity that seeks collective liberation. This book brilliantly connects Rhodes Must Fall to today's Palestine Student Intifada. As I face deportation for solidarity, this analysis reveals why universities fear students: students expose their complicity, occupy their spaces, refuse their terms. Urgent, unapologetic, essential for anyone committed to dismantling colonial universities.
Mahmoud Khalil
Columbia University graduate
About Kayum
A. Kayum Ahmed is a South African activist-scholar. He is the author of Theorizing Fallism (2026) and A Is for Amandla (2024). Kayum has taught at Columbia University and held visiting scholar roles at Birzeit University and Harvard University. Kayum previously served as CEO of the South African Human Rights Commission.