Frances Baard
Frances Goitsemang Maswabi Baard was born in Beaconsfield, Kimberley in 1901. Her father was a Motswana who had come to work on the mines. She trained as a teacher, and then moved to Port Elizabeth, where she worked as a domestic worker, and then in the food and canning industry.
A natural organiser, she became a leading member and rose to secretary of the Food and Canning Workers’ Union, and was influenced by Raymond Mhlaba. She would later be on the executive committee of the South African Congress of Trade Unions.
A humble woman with a mother’s heart, she was walking to work one morning when she saw men lying in puddles of water because they had nowhere to sleep: “I wept and resolved that something must be done”.
She wasted no time, attending her first ANC meeting and joining the movement in 1948. She fast became a women’s leader in the Eastern Province ANC, as well as the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL). In the 1952 Defiance Campaign, she was an ANCWL organiser in the Eastern Province, where the campaign saw the most success.
In April 1953, Baard was one of three women activists in Port Elizabeth who held a meeting that galvanised the creation of the Federation of South African Women (Fedsaw). Together with Ray Alexander Simons and Florence Matomela, she decided the time was right to call a meeting to discuss forming a national women’s organisation, and did so that very evening. From there, things moved quickly.
Baard founded the Port Elizabeth branch of the organisation, and was on the Fedsaw executive committee, galvanising involvement in the planned march to Pretoria from women throughout the Eastern Province.
Because of her active involvement in the Freedom Charter, Baard was arrested in the 1956 Treason Trial. Baard was again detained in 1960 and 1963, where the state put the aging woman in solitary confinement for 12 months. Describing this harrowing ordeal, she said “I nearly went off my mind”.
In 1964 she was finally sentenced for contravening the Suppression of Communism Act, with a punishment of five years in prison for involvement in ANC activities.
When she was released from prison in 1969, she was banned under apartheid state laws, restricting her movement, freedom of association and personal freedoms. Far worse was the cruelty of forcing her to be apart from her children and family. Baard was banished from the Eastern Province to Mabopane township, near Pretoria.
She was unable to leave, isolated to a strange place where she had no relatives and knew no one. When she was banished, the municipality also evicted her children from their family home, forcing them to scatter across the country.
No matter the hardship, she persevered in activism, including as a patron of the United Democratic Front in the 1980s. She wrote a moving account of her experiences with Barbie Schreiner entitled My Spirit is Not Banned.
Baard passed away in 1997. The Frances Baard Municipality i n the Northern Cape, whose seat is Kimberley, her birthplace, was named in her honour.
When Hilda Bernstein i nterviewed Baard in the 1970s, she noted Baard’s indestructible spirit, despite her ordeals in the face of poverty, state persecution, injury and old age. Her final words on her experiences were “I have survived”. — Romi Reinecke Algeria. In 1966, she was appointed the ANC’s deputy chief representative to North Africa. She was also the ANC’s representative to the Pan African Women’s Organisation, and in 1973 she was elected general secretary of the All-Africa Women’s Conference. After her husband died in 1973, Resha moved to London, where she became the chairperson of the ANC London Branch and deputy chairperson of the Women’s League branch. She returned to South Africa in 1993, living in Romohlokana until her death in 2003. — Fatima Asmal