My friend the Rev Zolile Mbali, who has died aged 84, was an Anglican priest in the UK and in his native South Africa, from which he was forced to move in the early 1970s.
Zoli was born in Johannesburg to a Xhosa father and a Sotho mother, Elizabeth (nee Makhoatle), a teacher. After his birth his mother took him to live on the family farm beyond Matatiele in the remote Drakensburg foothills of Transkei. He lived there until he was 10, combining herding with learning in isiXhosa and Sesotho. Sent to further his education in Afrikaans, he stayed with a clergyman uncle near Johannesburg, whose curate at the time was Desmond Tutu.
As a teenager Zoli’s formal education was interrupted by the need to support his family, and while working in harsh conditions on a railway tunnel, he contracted typhoid. In hospital he decided to study for the Anglican priesthood, attending St Bede’s theological college in Mthatha and then Fort Hare University.
Zoli moved to the UK in 1969 on a World Council of Churches scholarship to Oxford on Tutu’s recommendation, studying theology at Queen’s College, Oxford. There he met a British woman, Charlotte Lebon, a postgraduate student at St Hugh’s College. Returning to South Africa in 1971, he was ordained in the Natal diocese and undertook parish work before becoming the first black chaplain at Grahamstown’s white theological college in the Eastern Cape.
The couple became engaged, but the apartheid ban on mixed relationships prevented Charlotte from joining Zoli, so in 1973 she moved to Gaborone in Botswana to be nearer to him. A year later he joined her in Botswana after being warned that the South African police were after him. Less than a month later he and Charlotte were married, in 1975.
In Gaborone Zoli combined a post at Botswana Theological Extension Programme with ministry among refugees and rural communities. South Africa having refused to renew his passport, Zoli then became a refugee himself. With cross-border military raids putting the family at risk, he and Charlotte decided to return to the UK in 1981, by which time they had three daughters, Thandiwe, Ma-Jali and Mandisa.
On his arrival Zoli was appointed vicar of All Saints’ church in Preston-on-Tees in County Durham, before moving to parish ministry in Leicestershire in 1984, serving first as curate in the Leicester suburb of Knighton and then as vicar to four rural village churches known as “the Langtons” near Market Harborough.
His excoriating book, The Churches and Racism: A Black South African Perspective, published in 1987, was based on a PhD he had recently completed at the University of Leeds.
From 1988 to 1992 Zoli worked as a pioneering diocesan community relations officer in Leicester, and he was made a canon of Leicester Cathedral in 1990.
Once apartheid fell, he and his family went back to South Africa in 1993, settling in Durban, where Charlotte joined the staff of Natal University while Zoli ministered to parishioners stigmatised by HIV/Aids and Anglican students at the university.
A gentle and courageous man with a great gift for storytelling, he retired from the ministry in 2003 and would later survive a serious criminal assault and several bouts of ill-health. In 2017 his daughters persuaded him to retire to the UK with Charlotte to be nearer their grandchildren. Suffering from dementia, he spent his last days in St Anselm’s nursing home in Walmer, Kent.
He is survived by Charlotte, their daughters and five grandchildren.
