Finally after spending a day on this and several false starts, I was able to find a solution and get it working. Posting it her so that others may refer to it.
from kafka import SimpleClient
from kafka.protocol.offset import OffsetRequest, OffsetResetStrategy
from kafka.common import OffsetRequestPayload
client = SimpleClient(brokers)
partitions = client.topic_partitions[topic]
offset_requests = [OffsetRequestPayload(topic, p, -1, 1) for p in partitions.keys()]
offsets_responses = client.send_offset_request(offset_requests)
for r in offsets_responses:
print "partition = %s, offset = %s"%(r.partition, r.offsets[0])