Career
She was popularly known as Amai (Mother) in Zimbabwe. She went to Achimota Secondary School, she went on to university to study before qualifying as a teacher. This resulted in her being charged with sedition and sentenced to five years imprisonment, part of which was suspended.
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. 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.
Her father died in 1970. Here, she cast herself in the new role of a mother figure to the thousands of refugees created by the Rhodesian Bush War.
This earned her the popular title Amai (Mother).
In 1978 she was elected ZANU-Public Finance Deputy Secretary for the Women"s League. 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. She also founded the Zimbabwe Child Survival Movement.
Sally Mugabe launched the Zimbabwe Women"s Cooperative in the United Kingdom in 1986 and supported Akina Mama wa Afrika, a London-based African women"s organisation focusing on development and women"s issues in Africa and the United Kingdom.
Hayfron 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.
