Today Zimbabwe remembers the passing on of former First Lady Sally Mugabe who died of kidney failure on the 27th of January 1992 in Harare. Here are five things you probably did not know about Robert Mugabe’s first wife:
- She was the first woman to be buried at the National Heroes Acre in Harare after being declared a national hero.
- Sally met Robert Mugabe at Takoradi Teacher Training College before getting married in April 1961 in the then Salisbury city of Rhodesia. The couple were blessed with a baby boy in 1963 whom they christened Micheal Nhamodzenyika (a Shona name which means misfortunes are with us). Nhamo however passed away in 1966 in Ghana after succumbing to Malaria.
- In 1967, Sally went into exile in Britain after the arrest of her husband Mugabe together with other nationalists from the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) party. She spent the next eight years campaigning for the release of political detainees in Rhodesia, including her husband who had been arrested in 1964 and was to remain incarcerated for eleven years.
- In 1978 she was elected Zanu deputy secretary for the Women’s League.
- She was elected secretary-general of the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) Women’s League at the party’s congress in 1989
You can read her full autobiography HERE