South African Deputy President David Mabuza on Friday, said that the correctional services department must record the history of all political prisoners and distribute it to various learning institutions and the public in general.

"As part of the necessary process of recording our history, the department of correctional services must endeavour properly to record everything relating to all prisoners of conscience who perished in apartheid jails either by torture or execution and make these available to our institutions of learning, the media and the general public," Mabuza said. 

"Apart from the importance of posterity, this record will serve as a permanent flickering light. It will be a pointer to any blind spot the likely straying into which might take us back to a period of our history we must never again revisit." 

Mabuza was speaking at the Kgoshi Mampuru Correctional Centre on Friday morning at a government event to commemorate the life of uMkhonto weSizwe operative Solomon Mahlangu, who was executed by the apartheid government on this day 39 years ago.

"Today's commemoration is testimony to our consciousness that government has a moral responsibility to provide physical and material security to the citizenry and an affirmation that it shall never again appropriate to itself the right to determine who will live and who shall die," Mabuza said.

Mabuza said that the political prisoners who were executed at the prison propelled the country forward.

"The young people of the country must know that the freedom that we have today was born by the sacrifices made and bravery by young hero's like Solomon," Mabuza said.

"This day serves as a reminder to all of us that this must not happen. We who are still alive today must jealously guard our freedom."