I am using the Python high level consumer for Kafka and want to know the latest offsets for each partition of a topic. However I cannot get it to work. 

```
from kafka import TopicPartition
from kafka.consumer import KafkaConsumer

con = KafkaConsumer(bootstrap_servers = brokers)
ps = [TopicPartition(topic, p) for p in con.partitions_for_topic(topic)]

con.assign(ps)
for p in ps:
    print "For partition %s highwater is %s"%(p.partition,con.highwater(p))

print "Subscription = %s"%con.subscription()
print "con.seek_to_beginning() = %s"%con.seek_to_beginning()

```

But the output I get is 

```
For partition 0 highwater is None
For partition 1 highwater is None
For partition 2 highwater is None
For partition 3 highwater is None
For partition 4 highwater is None
For partition 5 highwater is None
....
For partition 96 highwater is None
For partition 97 highwater is None
For partition 98 highwater is None
For partition 99 highwater is None
Subscription = None
con.seek_to_beginning() = None
con.seek_to_end() = None

```

I have an alternate approach using `assign` but the result is the same

```
con = KafkaConsumer(bootstrap_servers = brokers)
ps = [TopicPartition(topic, p) for p in con.partitions_for_topic(topic)]

con.assign(ps)
for p in ps:
    print "For partition %s highwater is %s"%(p.partition,con.highwater(p))

print "Subscription = %s"%con.subscription()
print "con.seek_to_beginning() = %s"%con.seek_to_beginning()
print "con.seek_to_end() = %s"%con.seek_to_end()

```

It seems from some of the documentation that I might get this behaviour if a `fetch` has not been issued. But I cannot find a way to force that. What am I doing wrong?

Or is there a different/simpler way to get the latest offsets for a topic?