At a Glance
Pniel, Port Elizabeth, and the Making of a Working-Class Political Life
Frances Baard was born in 1909 in Pniel — a place whose name and history carried meanings that most South African communities did not share. Pniel had been established in the nineteenth century as a mission station for freed slaves and for Khoikhoi and other indigenous people who had been displaced by the colonial land seizures of the Cape. The community that grew up there had a specific historical consciousness — a memory of dispossession that went back to the colonial encounter itself, not merely to the apartheid system that codified it into law after 1948 — and a tradition of community organisation and self-governance that the mission station framework had both enabled and constrained.
She came to Port Elizabeth as a young woman, following the migration route that brought Black and Coloured South Africans from the rural Western and Eastern Cape to the port city's growing industrial economy. Port Elizabeth in the 1920s and 1930s was a significant industrial centre — the motor industry would later make it particularly important — and the city's working-class African and Coloured communities were building the union and political organisations that would eventually make the Eastern Cape one of the liberation movement's strongest regions. Frances found work as a laundress and domestic worker — the occupations most readily available to Black women in the urban economy — and in this working life she encountered directly the conditions that the trade union movement was organised to address.
The Food and Canning Workers Union, which Ray Alexander Simons had built in the Western Cape and which had established branches across the country, was one of SACTU's constituent unions when SACTU was formed in 1955, and it was the organisational vehicle through which Baard came to the liberation movement's wider structures. Building the Port Elizabeth branch of the union required the same qualities that characterise all effective union organising: the ability to gain the trust of workers who had every reason to be cautious about collective action, to explain clearly what a union could do and what it could not do, to navigate the legal and practical obstacles that the apartheid system placed in the way of Black workers' organisation, and to sustain commitment through the periods of setback and repression that were the inevitable accompaniments of trade union work in apartheid South Africa.
The Women's March, SACTU, and the Eastern Cape Alliance
The intersection of trade union work and women's liberation politics was, for Baard, not a theoretical synthesis but a practical reality of daily life. The women who worked in the food and canning industries of Port Elizabeth were simultaneously workers exploited by the racial labour system and women subordinated by the gender hierarchy that structured both the workplace and the domestic sphere. The specific conditions of women workers — their vulnerability to dismissal when they became pregnant, the double burden of paid work and unpaid domestic labour, the particular forms of workplace harassment and control that women experienced — required political responses that went beyond the general framework of anti-apartheid and labour rights demands.
The Federation of South African Women, formed in 1954 to coordinate the women's movement across the Congress Alliance's constituent organisations, was the framework through which Baard's Women's League work and her union work converged. The Federation's campaign against the extension of pass laws to women — the campaign that culminated in the August 1956 march to the Union Buildings — was one that Baard was central to in the Eastern Cape, organising the women of Port Elizabeth to make the journey to Pretoria and to add their presence to the twenty thousand who stood in the Union Buildings amphitheatre.
SACTU's alignment with the Congress Alliance in 1955 and the formation of a coherent political and industrial coalition — in which Baard's union work, her Women's League work, and her ANC connections were all expressions of the same integrated commitment — was the organisational context in which the Eastern Cape liberation movement developed its distinctive character: strongly rooted in the working class, deeply embedded in the township communities, and committed to a programme that connected the immediate material conditions of workers and township residents to the broader political demands of the liberation struggle.
The Treason Trial and Its Aftermath
The arrest of 156 Congress Alliance activists in December 1956 and the subsequent Treason Trial was the apartheid government's most ambitious attempt to destroy the Congress Alliance by tying its leadership in years of legal proceedings. Baard was among the accused, and her inclusion reflected both her standing in the Eastern Cape movement and the government's assessment that people like her — the union organisers and women's movement leaders who built the movement's mass base — were at least as dangerous as the more prominent political figures who tended to attract greater public attention.
The trial lasted until March 1961 when the remaining accused were acquitted. For Baard, as for all the accused, it imposed years of disruption — the requirement to appear in court at intervals that made sustained organising difficult, the financial costs of legal defence, the psychological strain of long-running legal proceedings that threatened imprisonment. But it also, paradoxically, created the conditions for the building of cross-organisational relationships that the more dispersed work of normal political activity did not always produce: the accused who came together from across South Africa and across the Alliance's constituent organisations had years of shared experience of the trial that deepened their political relationships and their personal trust in ways that the liberation movement's subsequent history would draw on.
After the acquittal in 1961, the political landscape had been transformed: the ANC had been banned, Umkhonto we Sizwe was being established, and the era of open legal political organisation was definitively over. Baard navigated this transformation with the same patient courage that had characterised her entire career, maintaining her union work and her community organising within the constraints that the banning orders and the post-1960 repression imposed, and contributing to the networks that sustained the movement through the difficult years ahead.
Detention, Banning, and the Confiscated Passport
The apartheid state's harassment of Baard through the 1960s and 1970s took the forms that it deployed against grassroots organisers across the country: detention without trial, banning orders that restricted her movements and public activities, the confiscation of her passport to prevent her from traveling. Each of these measures was designed to diminish her effectiveness and to signal to the communities she organised that the state could and would impose costs on those who persisted in challenging it.
The confiscation of her passport to prevent her from collecting an honorary doctorate from the University of the Western Cape was a particularly pointed act of petty cruelty — one that combined the practical harassment of restricting her movement with the symbolic humiliation of preventing her from receiving a public recognition of her contribution. The University of the Western Cape — which was itself in this period developing into one of the most politically engaged academic institutions in South Africa, a place where the liberation movement's intellectual traditions were nurtured — was conferring on her a recognition that the academic community had decided she deserved, and the apartheid government's confiscation of her passport was an assertion that it could prevent that recognition from being publicly expressed.
She responded to this, as to every other attempt to diminish her, with the spirit that her memoir's title expressed: her spirit was not banned. She continued her work within the constraints imposed. She eventually received the recognition the university had tried to give her. And she published her memoir — drawing on the oral history work that the collaborative writing process involved — as a contribution to the historical record that the apartheid state was simultaneously trying to suppress.
My Spirit is Not Banned: A Working-Class Women's Memoir
My Spirit is Not Banned, published in 1986 and developed through oral history interviews with Donya Foster, occupies a specific place in the literature of the South African liberation struggle. It is not the memoir of a national leader — it does not deal with the Rivonia Trial, the external mission, the constitutional negotiations, or the other dramatic events that dominate the liberation movement's historical narrative. It is the memoir of a Port Elizabeth laundress and union organiser, and its subject is the daily working-class political life of the Eastern Cape liberation movement as it was experienced from the inside of that community across six decades.
The memoir's significance lies precisely in what it is rather than what it is not. The historical record of the liberation struggle is disproportionately shaped by the accounts of its nationally prominent figures — the leaders who gave speeches, the activists who were imprisoned for high-profile trials, the exiles who published from London or Lusaka. The experiences of the grassroots organisers who built the movement's mass base — the union shop stewards, the Women's League branch leaders, the civic association members — are systematically underrepresented, and Baard's memoir is one of the relatively few first-person accounts from this level of the movement that achieved significant publication and distribution.
It is also a feminist document in the specific sense that it centres the experience of a Black working-class woman in a movement whose history had largely been told by and about men. Baard's account of what it meant to be a woman in the liberation movement — the specific burdens and specific contributions of women who combined paid work, unpaid domestic labour, and political organising in the conditions of apartheid South Africa — was a contribution to the historical record that the women's movement and the labour movement both needed and that neither had produced in this form before.
Legacy
Frances Baard's legacy is the legacy of the working-class women's tradition in the South African liberation movement — the tradition of women who came to politics through the trade union movement and the community organisation that daily life in the township required, who combined industrial organising with women's liberation work, and who built the mass base that the liberation movement's national leadership depended on. Her specific contribution to Port Elizabeth's liberation movement was foundational: the Food and Canning Workers Union branch she built, the Women's League networks she maintained, the participation in the Treason Trial and in the 1956 women's march that connected her work to the national movement's most significant events.
Her memoir gave working-class women's experience a place in the historical record that the mainstream liberation movement historiography had not provided, and its title — My Spirit is Not Banned — expressed something essential not only about Frances Baard but about the entire tradition she represented: the tradition of people whose spirits the apartheid state could not ban, no matter how many banning orders it issued, because those spirits were rooted in something deeper than any law could reach.
She died in 1997 at eighty-eight, having lived to vote in 1994 and having seen the democratic South Africa she had spent her life building take its first steps. The economic transformation that her union work was aimed at — the closing of the gap between the wealthy and the poor, the recognition of the dignity and the rights of the working class that the Freedom Charter described — remains unfinished. The work of finishing it is the most appropriate tribute to what she spent her life doing.