[2] Her missionary father, Reginald Stephen Garfield Todd, served as Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia between 1953 and 1958.

Her mother, Jean Grace Wilson Todd, designed and implemented the Southern Rhodesian African Educational System.

Todd was a political activist from the early 1960s when she joined the Black Nationalist movement by becoming a member of the National Democratic Party (NDP) which was formed in 1960.

In 1978 she was among the founding members of Zimbabwe Project Trust, a humanitarian organization connected to the Roman Catholic Church.

[6] That same year, she was stripped of her Zimbabwean citizenship, when she was unable to comply with a court order to renounce her potential dual nationality because of her parents' birth in New Zealand.