Frances Goitsemang Baard, affectionately known as Mma Baard, was born in Green Point, Beaconsfield, Kimberley, on 1 October 1909 (some sources suggest 1901).

Her father came to Kimberley to work on the mines and met Baard’s mother there.

Frances attended the Racecourse Primary School and the Lyndhurst Road School in Malay Camp, Kimberley, before enrolling for a short time at Kimberley's famous Perseverance School. She worked briefly as a teacher and then, moving to Port Elizabeth, as a domestic servant and a factory worker.

In Port Elizabeth, she married Lucas Baard in 1942, having known him from school days.

It was at this time that Baard became an activist in the African National Congress, which she joined in 1948, and a trade unionist, as a result of her experiences of oppression and exploitation under Apartheid.

She was an organiser in the ANC Women's League in 1952 at the time of the Defiance Campaign, serving later in various positions.

In 1955 Baard was actively involved in drafting the Freedom Charter and was one of the leaders of the Women's march to the Union Buildings in Pretoria on 9 August 1956 in protest against the pass laws.

She was also one of the defendants in the Treason Trial.

Baard was arrested in 1960 and then again in 1963 when she was kept in solitary confinement for 12 months. In 1964 she was arrested yet again under the Suppression of Communism Act for her involvement with ANC activities, being sentenced to five years imprisonment.

Following her release in 1969, she was banished to Boekenhout, moving two years later when her banning order expired to Mabopane near Pretoria where she died in 1997.

In June 2001, the "Diamantveld District Council", Kimberley, was renamed Frances Baard District Municipality in her honour.

In commemoration of her role in the Women's March on 9th August 1956, a bronze statue of her was also unveiled in Kimberley, at the corner of Bultfontein and Lennox Road, in 2014, with the inscription on the granite plinth reading, "My spirit is not banned. I still say I want freedom in my lifetime."

Baard was also remembered in the renaming of Schoeman Street in Pretoria in 2012.

Source: Wikipedia