KU News Release

Essay on challenging apartheid in South Africa wins 2008 Whitcomb contest

LAWRENCE — A senior in history and political science at the University of Kansas has won the 2008 Philip W. Whitcomb Memorial Essay Contest for his composition on the struggle in South Africa to combat the intellectual underpinnings of apartheid.

Andrew James MacDonald, Overland Park, won the $500 prize for his essay, “Thought and Action in South Africa: How the African National Congress Challenged the Apartheid Mindset.”

Faculty judging the contest said MacDonald’s essay interestingly and effectively addressed the contest’s theme of knowledge, thought and action in public affairs and public policy.

“The essay’s closeness of historical characterization, sharpness of focus and clear, moving prose contributed substantially to its success,” said John Bricke, professor of philosophy.

MacDonald’s essay focused on the struggle over knowledge and thought fostered by the African National Congress, especially in the 1940s and 1950s, in its efforts toward the elimination of apartheid by the subversion of apartheid’s purported theoretical foundations, Bricke noted.

In those decades, the party “forged a racially inclusive counter-narrative to combat apartheid’s intellectual underpinnings,” MacDonald wrote.

South Africa is unique in its political dynamics, MacDonald said. As entrenched as apartheid was, South Africa was able to change policy relatively peacefully — it could have been much worse, he added.

The party’s use of the concept of national rights to counter the colonial concept of a racial hierarchy of groups particularly impressed MacDonald. The progress the party achieved “shows the efficacy of an intellectually coherent movement in affecting significant change,” he wrote. Apartheid officially ended in the 1990s.

His inspiration for the essay originated in a history course on the rise and fall of apartheid taught by Surenda Bhana, professor emeritus of history. MacDonald later chose apartheid as the subject of his honors thesis. Elizabeth MacGonagle, associate professor of history, was his adviser.

MacDonald plans to work for a year or two following his graduation this month. Eventually, he plans to attend law school and work in policy consulting. He is the son of James and Eileen MacDonald of Overland Park and is a graduate of Blue Valley West High School in Stilwell.

The Whitcomb essay contest has taken place annually since 1988. The prize includes a book and the inscription of the winner’s name on the Whitcomb plaque in the Nunemaker Center. The contest is open to any KU undergraduate. Past winners have come from engineering, English, philosophy, architectural engineering, anthropology, mathematics and other subject areas.

The contest honors Philip W. Whitcomb (1891-1986), who earned a doctorate in philosophy at KU in 1981 at age 89. A journalist by trade, Whitcomb received a bachelor’s degree in 1910 from Washburn University and was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University from 1911 to 1914. His career as a European journalist spanned 64 years and 17 countries. As an Associated Press correspondent, he covered the first and second world wars. He also was a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, Baltimore Sun, New York Tribune and Boston Evening Transcript. Upon his retirement from the Christian Science Monitor in 1978, he entered graduate school at KU.

Whitcomb’s dissertation was titled “Essence and Existence in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome and Francisco Suarez.” For part of his time at KU, he was a graduate teaching assistant in the humanities and western civilization program. He died in Paris in 1986 at age 94.

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