While members of the ANC cleaned the statue that was burnt by EFF members last week, Martin said that history tells you where you come from and what happened.
"Therefore we decided to clean the statue. The ANC has to take the lead as the ruling party to ensure that every culture's history is protected.
"Mistakes from the past have to change your life to prevent it from happening again. No one's history should be broken down to benefit another's."
He repeated his call to people who want to damage apartheid and colonial statues to make a contribution to history, rather than destroying it.
This comes after an elderly man was arrested on Monday evening for allegedly damaging a statue where Cape Road meets Russell Road in Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape police said.
Brigadier Ronald Koll, station commander at the Humewood police station, said the man was arrested for allegedly targeting the statue and damaging it.
HeraldLive reported on Monday that the statue was built in memory of animals that died during the Boer War, also known as the Anglo-Boer War.
The man was expected to appear in the New Law Courts in Port Elizabeth on Tuesday.
The statue is the second in the province to be damaged in the last week, after the War Memorial statue in Uitenhage's Market Square was set alight on Thursday.
EFF deputy chairperson for the Nelson Mandela Bay region, Bo Madwara, later confirmed that the local chapter was behind the setting alight of the Uitenhage statue. "Unfortunately we could not topple the statue, as the police came and stopped us." – News24
