Forty years ago, a prisoner in solitary confinement on South Africa's Robben Island had unusual insights into the Middle East: He warned against "humiliation" of the Arabs and urged that Israel "wash the enemies' wounds." A "grand gesture," he said, was needed for peace.

Imagine how different our lives would be today if his advice had been heeded! And what dramatic change could be achieved if put into practice even now.

The prisoner was Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe: He led the Pan-Africanist Congress, whose protests against apartheid on March 21, 1960, led to the Sharpeville massacre, in which police killed 68 demonstrators. Sobukwe was jailed for three years for incitement. As his imprisonment neared its end, a special law was rushed through parliament giving the government the power to continue his detention on a year-by-year basis, without trial. He was kept on his own, seeing few visitors, on Robben Island.

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Sobukwe was allowed to receive newspapers and followed world events closely. We wrote to each other - with great difficulty, because the prison censors delayed our letters for many weeks or simply confiscated them.

After the end of the 1967 war in the Middle East, he wrote that "vicarious Israeli heroes are individually and severally telling us what lessons are to be drawn from the conflict. Unfortunately, the lessons are merely a rationalization of prejudices.

"I would have felt happier if Levi Eshkol didn't have a [Moshe] Dayan to put up with. As one correspondent has said, Dayan is no Churchill. I am afraid he is allowing the ululations of the vicarious heroes to go to his head.

"And yet the touch that is needed is the toning down of the humiliation under which the Arabs smart. Somebody has said a man will forgive you, after some time, for defrauding him or even taking his wife away from him but no man will forget or forgive a humiliation. Eshkol has the personality and the ability, I think, to wash his enemies' wounds."

Sobukwe went on: "In the American Civil War it is recorded that Grant treated Lee when he came to surrender, as though he were his superior officer. When he left the hall, Grant and his men saluted. Quite recently, in a boxing championship in Britain, the Scottish champion McGowan was forced to retire because of a badly cut eye. The defending champion, an Asian, who was defeating McGowan for the second time, went to McGowan's corner - and they say McGowan was in tears - and knelt before him. The grand gesture.

"A further illustration. Moshoeshoe I [19th century king of the Basotho nation, today Lesotho], when attacked by the Zulus, inflicted a crushing defeat on them at Thaba Bosiu and, as they retreated, sent a large herd of cattle to 'his brothers.' The Zulus never again attacked him. He cut the English forces to ribbons in 1852, and while Cathcart, the British Commander, was in a state of bewilderment and humiliation, sued for peace!

"I am not saying Israel should be 'magnanimous.' If I were Nasser I would want no magnanimity from the Jews. All I am saying is that it is Eshkol and not Nasser who can afford a diplomatic rebuff, it is 'adulations' that might go to Dayan's head, 'not ululations.'"

In another letter, tensions in the Middle East caused him to write that if I had any influence with Dayan I should give him a warning. I did not know Dayan so could not pass on the message: "He'll be seeking to talk genuine peace when Arab humiliation has rendered such a prospect impossible." On the other hand, Sobukwe thought a newspaper article by Dayan's daughter, Yael, "very well balanced - with none of the arrogance that characterises her father's references to Arabs.

"I say it once more: Nobody is going to be 'taught a lesson' by anybody. The days for that type of mentality are over: between nations and between individuals. Our own children demand that we justify our 'right' to teach them a lesson."

Nor did he approve of Shimon Peres, then secretary-general of Rafi, whom I interviewed when he visited Johannesburg after the Six-Day War. I sent Sobukwe the text published in my newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail. Sobukwe responded: "Throughout his interview Peres says: 'We told them...' Just imagine [King] Hussein in Peres' place, with the roles reversed, saying 'We told the Jews' and taste it in your mouth."

Sobukwe did not live to put his thinking into practice. The government held him on Robben Island for six years and continued to fear him for his commitment to freedom. He was banished to the town of Kimberley with severe restrictions on his liberty. He died there of cancer nine years later, in February 1978.

These details are extracted from "How Can Man Die Better: The Life of Robert Sobukwe," by Benjamin Pogrund, now reissued in paperback by Jonathan Ball Publishers, Johannesburg.