PRAISE should go to President Jacob Zuma for his latest selection of outstanding South Africans deserving honour - especially Tsietsi Mashinini, the symbol of the June 16 1976 Soweto uprisings.

This recognition on Freedom Day is long overdue, given the significance of the mass revolt and its acclaim as the key stepping stone to the historic developments leading to democracy in this country.

Mashinini, the late president of the now-defunct Soweto Student Representative Council who died in the early 1990s, has remained largely unheralded.

Seventeen years into our democracy have been disappointingly marked by selective honouring of key figures by government with other deserving individuals belonging to other liberation movements - such as Mashinini - surprisingly ignored until now.

Another long-deserving individual is Sam Nzima, whose picture of the dying Hector Pietersen lying in the arms of Mbuyisa Makhubo remains one of the most haunting images of our time. The President bestowed on him the Order of Ikhamanga.

Celebrations of June 16 as a watershed event have been rather muffled so far.

This could perhaps be attributed to the fact that the ANC was largely caught unawares and even ill-prepared by the events of the day and thereafter - something to which its leading light, OR Tambo, would later be quoted as having candidly conceded.

A lesson to all of us is that history will always stand in defence of itself against sanitation, selective memory and manipulation.