The Revd Dr Liz Carmichael writes:
THE Revd Estcourt Zolile Mbali entered The Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1968, to read theology. He was sent by the Anglican Church of the Province of Southern Africa on a World Council of Churches (WCC) scholarship. It was assumed that he would return to apartheid South Africa as a theologian and teacher; but the heart had other reasons.
Zolile was born in Soweto, Johannesburg, in 1940. His first decade was spent in rural Transkei, where he herded the family’s flocks alongside going to school. He went to live near Johannesburg with his maternal uncle, whose curate was Desmond Tutu.
Zolile’s secondary education was disrupted when, to help his family, he worked on a dangerous railway-construction site and caught typhoid. The care that he was given attracted him to ministry, and he enrolled at St Bede’s College, Umtata, the main theological college for black ordinands. The Principal, Canon Michael Carmichael, spotted Zolile’s intelligence and arranged for him first to take a degree in English and philosophy at Fort Hare University, and then, with Tutu’s help, to go to Oxford. At Heathrow, Zolile was surprised by the sight of whites doing manual work.
Zolile met Charlotte Lebon, a white British postgraduate in English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. They became engaged, but apartheid laws forbidding inter-racial marriage would prevent their living in South Africa. Zolile graduated in 1971, was ordained in Natal, and, in 1972, became the first Black chaplain and tutor of St Paul’s College, Grahamstown (now the College of the Transfiguration, Makhanda), then the main college for white ordinands. He had to live in the black township.
Zolile and Charlotte secretly planned to marry in 1975 and work in Botswana, in the Anglican Province of Central Africa. In 1974, Charlotte took up a teaching post in Gaborone and then visited Zolile in Grahamstown’s township. A church member informed the police, and then confessed their action to Zolile. Fearing arrest, Zolile left immediately, driving the 730 miles to Botswana. The marriage took place in January 1975 in Gaborone Cathedral. Zolile began seven years of parish work, and taught theology by extension, travelling throughout Botswana. During this time, the couple had three daughters.
Cross-border raids from South Africa were intensifying, and Zolile was anxious to pursue a doctorate under his Oxford tutor, David Jenkins, now Professor at Leeds. In 1981, he was offered the parish of All Saints’, Preston-on-Tees. One parishioner, Mary Hart, remembers Zolile as “a very special man who lived his faith”.
En route to Preston, three months at the missionary College of the Ascension, Selly Oak, in Birmingham, gave Zolile access to libraries. He embarked on a study of the British and South African Churches in relation to racism, and in particular their actions and inaction in relation to the Programme to Combat Racism (PCR) created in 1970 under the WCC. The PCR’s Special Fund dispensed grants for humanitarian use to liberation movements, particularly in Southern Africa, as a sign of solidarity and actual transfer of power. Furious media-fed controversy ensued, centring on the legitimacy of violence in response to oppression.
Zolile produced a well-documented, fair-minded study of the wide range of perceptions, issues, fears, and disappointments involved. Originally intended as a doctorate, it was published as The Churches and Racism: A Black South African perspective (SCM Press, 1987).
Many of the issues are perennial, and the discussion remains topical: violent resistance and non-violence; the need to include and hear the voice of those affected; the impact of the theological self-understanding of nations; principled action, and moral courage. Zolile’s Black experience shines through in the human sympathy and deep moral sense of a writer for whom, as he quietly expresses it, racism is constant and existential: “It has determined in no small measure the person I am, and the one I am prevented from becoming.”
In the WCC’s Ecumenical Review, a former PCR Director, Baldwin Sjollema, called the book “a fine example of a case study written by a perceptive theologian”. In his review in the Church Times, David Paton concluded that it “ought to be taken very seriously indeed, especially by those who have the courage to think Christianly about the future of our ‘Global Village’’” (7 July 1987).
Zolile became Leicester diocesan community and race-relations officer in 1988, and an Hon. Canon of Leicester Cathedral in 1992. In 1993, he and Charlotte settled in Durban, where Zolile undertook parish work and was Anglican Chaplain to the University. He retired in 2003. To be closer to grandchildren, they moved to Ashford, Kent in 2017. Zolile, now suffering from dementia, was well looked after by the NHS.
The Revd Estcourt Zolile Mbali died on 1 April, aged 84.
