I can hear them, the excited little pops of cork exploding out of heavy glass necks. I can hear them from 13,000 kms away across several oceans and from different points on the globe, and the poppers of these corks are the ‘we knew its’ and the ‘I told you sos’ who fled South Africa in mini-migrations from the early 90’s onwards.

I can picture the scenes.

The stooped couple in their twilight years. The first wave to leave ahead of the elections in ’94. They’re in their little outer London flat, or if they’re lucky a small, doily bedecked  bungalow somewhere suburban. This is cheap champagne and their sad smiles are pulled across their weathered faces. Their decision to run from black rule has finally been justified. Their years of morose unhappiness and perpetual unease at the relative stability and blossoming reconciliation in the rainbow nation; their double decade of jealous rage at the lifestyles of their friends whom remained. All of these things now justified.

The botoxed, inflated & tight waisted Jewish women in St Ives and Double Bay. The dentists’ and cosmetic surgeons’ wives, now divorced and living loud in the coffee shops, hairdressers and nail bars around Sydney. These woman cackle and tap tap their titanium gelled talons against their glasses, to choruses of ‘the fucking ANC…we knew it…we told those fucking liberal moffies that it wouldn’t work…see. Top me up. Yes!’

The young professional couple in their tidy Perth flat grinning from ear to ear. Their friends should have listened to them. They knew it. They told them that ‘they’ would drive the economy into the ground. That ‘they’ would get more violent and that ‘they’ would [insert any negative]…and that they should have come with them to this wonderful(ly fucking dull nirvana for terrified white folk). The ‘they’ can’t get them here…oh no, not here.

So what is it that has got these corks popping, the botox cackling, the young, uptight self-righteousness slyly bursting forth…it’s Zuma’s latest ‘fuck you’ to his country. His sacking of Finance Minister Nene. The man who said ‘no’ to his odious demand for a personal jet. The man who questioned why South Africa needed a mortally wounded national carrier. The one human being fighting to keep South Africa’s status out of the analysts’ junk pile…and here’s the rub. I’m not South African…so I have no axe to grind, but I have, in the past had to endure the relentless negativity and gutless whinging and whining of these modern day migrants. These settlers, ‘settling’ in far flung countries, congealing in suburbs in their numbers, bringing their biltong and  their Old Ma something or others fucking blatjang. I’ve stood squashed against them in tube trains across London and had to endure their boisterous conversations on the ferries criss-crossing Sydney’s incredible harbour. And 3 years ago I finally got the opportunity to move to South Africa and to ‘settle’ in Cape Town. To live in this wonderful land. The land I’d been told I was ‘focking mad’ to go to. ‘Was I not scared ‘they’ would kill me?’

I wasn’t scared and I was excited and I am also hopeful. Today especially I’m hopeful that this lastest nail that Zuma has hammered home is into his own coffin and not the coffin of the 60 million wonderful people who make up South Africa. I’m hopeful that people are going to see beyond politics, to humanity. That blacks, whites, Indians and coloureds are going to dig deep and find a way to rid this country of the foul, bloated creature that is hell bent on destruction and insatiable greed…I wonder if any of the South Africans abroad might choose to come home and make a difference, rather than sit in their bedsits, flats and their dull contractors’ desks toasting thier apparent ability to see into the future…I somehow doubt it.. but hey.