By Jack Krost

Sipo Mziemla Had Come a Long Way ... And So Has His Country

Oakhurst is filled with many fascinating people with interesting stories to tell. Here is one of them:
If you're looking for some handcrafted Zulu pottery, baskets, paintings or sculpture, what better place to look than Oakhurst?

That's where 69-year-old Sipo Mzimela calls home, after a lifelong odyssey that has taken him from his native South Africa, to the former Rhodesia and other parts of the African continent to train as an African National Congress (ANC) guerrilla, fighting apartheid. It also brought him to communist Czechoslovakia, West Germany, the United States, Kenya, back to South Africa to accept a cabinet position in the government of Nelson Mandela and then back to the United States.

You probably wouldn't think the balding, kindly-looking grandfather and former Episcopal priest has had such a turbulent past, if you met him outside his cottage-style home on Jefferson Place. But once inside, there are many poignant reminders -- photos of him standing alongside Mandela and the Zulu paintings, statues, rugs and baskets that are everywhere.

After his decades of travel and several political transformations born from disillusionment, Mzimela says he's come to realize one thing: "I love the United States -- the freedom that we have here, the opportunities, the friendship." He's lived in Oakhurst for two years, and finds it a "beautiful neighborhood, where we have many friends."

The Zulu art that fills his house represents his current business, which he runs with his wife, Gail DeCosta. Much of it is imported from cooperatives of mostly Zulu women living in South African villages, who don't have other outlets for their crafts. Their company is called Pambilli, which means "forward" in the Zulu language. The artwork is sold at fairs such as the quarterly Urban Market on Means Street.

Mzimela is a Zulu himself, born in Durban on the northeastern coast of South Africa. He grew up in the days before apartheid, when there was some discrimination but the races could live and go to school together.

Then, when he was 13, the Afrikaaner government imposed the policy of separate development of the races, with different rules for whites, Indians, people of mixed races and native Africans. Blacks had it the worst, restricted to certain occupations, forced to attend separate schools and live in separate neighborhoods and stripped of political rights.

"It was horrible to be moved away by force and separated from your friends," Mzimela says. "And all blacks had to have passes with them at all times. If you didn't, you were subject to arrest."

His parents joined the ANC, and later Mzimela followed in their footsteps. In its early days, the ANC was reform minded, promoting non-violent civil disobedience in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, who once lived in Durban. Blacks started breaking curfews and going without their passes. But Mzimela says that from the start, the struggle was much more difficult than the American civil rights movement, because South African blacks had no constitutional protections. Two years into the movement, leaders were arrested and charged with high treason. Ultimately, at Sharpeville in May 1960, 69 black protesters were killed by government troops. The protesters included women and children, some shot in the back as they fled.

At the time, Mzimela was working as a teacher and contemplating seminary school. "That was really the first time we experienced the murder of peaceful demonstrators. It made me angry with God and everything else!" Mzimela says.

He abandoned his plans to become a priest, instead leaving the country to train as a resistance fighter. That launched more than three decades of precarious travel, much of it without a passport. He moved through present day Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, before the ANC concluded some of its members must pursue higher education, and he accepted a scholarship in Prague to study education.

While training as a guerrilla, he had read a lot of Marx and Engels, but seeing Communism firsthand was a different experience. "It had all sounded so good in theory. Everybody was going to be equal, with no exploitation," Mzimela recalls. "But even the Czechs said it was no good." Disillusioned, he managed to persuade the American embassy to arrange for his transit to West Germany, where he studied business. He eventually made it to New York and revived his pursuit of seminary, becoming ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1977. He served in churches in New York and New Jersey and toured the United States, speaking about apartheid.
He also traveled to Kenya to teach seminary students, where he came in for more disillusionment, this time with the ANC itself. He met hundreds of South African refugees, who told tales of atrocities at ANC-run camps.

"When I realized that we were doing what we accused the apartheid government of doing, I resigned from the ANC and joined the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP)," he says. In 1988, he wound up in Atlanta, where he became an assistant priest at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church. He met DeCosta, a business consultant, through the church, and they married the next year.

But as apartheid crumbled in the early 1990s, they were drawn to South Africa. The elections of 1994 ended white rule and installed Mandela as president. Mzimela won a seat in parliament as an Inkatha representative and was named minister of corrections, one of three cabinet positions reserved for the party.
Despite being from a different party, he worked closely with Mandela to reform the prison system, freeing political prisoners and child inmates. So closely, in fact, that fellow IFP members became suspicious.

Ultimately, he concluded the only way forward would be for whites and blacks to work together, joining the United Democratic Movement in the late 1990s. But the movement fell apart, a victim of distrust and hostility by others.

That brought Mzimela and DeCosta back to the United States and their Oakhurst home. "We still go to St. Bartholomew's, and we have lots of friends here. That's what makes life worthwhile," Mzimela says. But through his Zulu art business, he keeps in touch with his native land. Sipo Mzimela: a man of God, educator, resistance fighter, legislator, art dealer and friend and neighbor.

Do you have an interesting neighbor? Let us know, at: jkrost@aol.com. And check out the Neighbors and History sections of the Oakhurst web site, www.oakhurstga.org, for past articles.