Ahead of the game, the streets of Washington DC, just down the road, and Baltimore were seas of green and gold as Bok supporters outnumbered the New Zealanders seemingly by 100 to 1. Walking along the Mall in Washington the morning before the game, you could confidently greet many of the passers-by as "oom".

New Zealand and South Africa are roughly equidistant from Baltimore, so why the outnumbering? The reason is that the stadium in Baltimore was packed full of ex-South African entrepreneurs, employers, and taxpayers who had been forced from the country of their birth by the racial policies, expropriation threats, and violence of their government.

When the stadium announcer said that South African Ambassador Roelf Meyer was in attendance, there was not a whisper of interest, but when prop Ox Nché was announced, the South African faithful roared their approval. That said it all. Meyer had earlier in the day published an article celebrating the trade and related successes that South Africa enjoyed with America. Did he see what this newspaper saw, that the greatest of the exports to America has been South Africa’s best people and taxpayers?

In a downtown bar afterwards, the assembled table, strangers to each other until that point, included a couple who had left after 1976, a chap who had left in the late 1980s because he did not want to fight in the townships, a professional couple who had left a decade ago, and the child of a South African farmer who had left recently and was considering settling. They were the perfect spectrum of the best of the past and the future of South Africa that the country has lost because of the policies of the governments Meyer had served. And it became apparent that each, in their own way, was right to have left, because they had made good lives for themselves in peace in America.

When the youngest at the table asked if she should go back, the answer was "no" because the government and business would discriminate against her because she was white, and the government was still threatening to expropriate all her family had worked for generations to build.

But for that one American end-of-summer evening, they were all in South Africa again, and the Boks were brilliant and won, and they were so happy but also sad because what they found in each other in Baltimore represented what they had all wanted for South Africa, but South Africa’s wicked and foolish governments had not wanted them.