Meet Sarah Francesca Hayfron the first wife of former Zimbabwean President Mugabe

- Adorable Sarah Francesca Mugabe became the first wife of former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe

- The late First Lady of Zimbabwe was considered as the founding mother of the Eastern African nation

- Sally was a human rights activist and in the early 1960s, mobilized African women to challenge Ian Smith's Rhodesian constitution

- Sally officially became the First Lady of Zimbabwe in 1987 when her husband became the 2nd President of Zimbabwe

Sarah Francesca ‘‘Sally’’ Mugabe, was the first wife of former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, and the First Lady, who was famed as Amai, mother in Zimbabwe.

Born in 1931 in the Gold Coast, now Ghana, then a British colony, Sally and her twin sister, Esther, were raised in a political family, which was part of the growing nationalist movement.

Sally went to Achimota Secondary School. Under their tutelage, she went on to university to study before qualifying as a teacher.

Sally Hayfron was a trained teacher who asserted her position as an independent political activist and campaigner.

She demonstrated this activism as early as 1962 when she was active in mobilizing African women to challenge Ian Smith's Rhodesian constitution which resulted in her being charged with sedition and sentenced to five years imprisonment, part of which was suspended.

She met her future husband, Robert Mugabe, at Takoradi Teacher Training College where they were both teaching. Hayfron married Robert Mugabe in April 1961 in Salisbury.

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In 1967, Sally went into exile in London, and resided in Ealing Broadway, West London; her stay in Britain was financed, at least in part, by the British Ariel Foundation.

She spent the next eight years agitating and campaigning for the release of political detainees in Rhodesia, including her husband who had been arrested in 1964 and was to remain incarcerated for ten years.

Their only son, Nhamodzenyika, who was born in 1963 during this period of detention and imprisonment, would succumb to a severe attack of malaria and die in Ghana in 1966. Sally Hayfron's father also died in 1970.

The British Home Office attempted to deport her, but after her husband petitioned the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, she was given British residency.

Her case for residency was supported by two British Government ministers in particular: Maurice Foley, M.P., from the Labour Party, and Lord Lothian, from the Tory Party.

Mugabe was prevented from attending the burial of his son and Sally was left to bear the physical and emotional burden of the loss all alone.

In 1978, she was elected ZANU-PF Deputy Secretary for the Women's League and in 1980, she had to make a quick adjustment to a new and national role of the wife of Zimbabwe's first black Prime Minister.

Sally officially became the First Lady of Zimbabwe in 1987 when her husband became the 2nd President of Zimbabwe.

She was elected Secretary General of the ZANU-PF Women's League at the Party's Congress of 1989.

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Sally also founded the Zimbabwe Child Survival Movement and launched the Zimbabwe Women's Cooperative in the U.K. in 1986.

She supported Akina Mama wa Africa, a London-based African women's organization focusing on development and women's issues in Africa and the United Kingdom.

Sally died on 27 January 1992 from kidney failure.

Upon her death, she was interred at the National Heroes Acre in Harare, Zimbabwe. In 2002, to mark the 10th anniversary of her death, Zimbabwe issued a set of four postage stamps, of a common design, using two different photographs, each photograph appearing on two of the denominations.

She is remembered fondly with love and affection, as she is still considered the founding mother of the nation of Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile, being one of the oldest women in the world, 111-year-old Willie Mae Hardy, has survived various remarkable moments in history and has lived through 20 presidents in America.

However, it would take her 100 years before voting for a black one.

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Source: YEN.com.gh