Is consummation legal?

As though hands-on diplomacy in Khorezm was not enough, recently we found ourselves with 13 dancing girls and one guy in residence at the Chancery.

This blandly phased question led to all-encompassing mayhem in Ankara for two weeks recently.

A group of young South African, Namibian and Zimbabwe dancers were recruited by an impresario in South Africa to perform in a nightclub in Ankara. Once they started, they found that they were expected to perform more than they had bargained for.

All of a sudden the Embassy found itself engulfed in a deadly serious game of mafia bosses and pretty maidens in distress, good cops and bad cops, women's rights advocates and ineffective lawyers, negotiating with Airline Managers with hand-held calculators plus feeding the fourteen with five loaves of bread and two small fishes for a week and planning schemes to spirit them out of Turkey by ferryboat to the Greek Islands before the nightclub owner could get injunction-and effectively force them back to work on his terms.

Then the Turkish media got hold of the story

Provocative publicity photos plucked from the front of the nightclub were splashed across the tabloids with headlines like "Nightclub Diplomacy", "Showgirls seek refugee in SA Embassy" and "Diplomatic Scandal" and captions like "We are supposed to enlighten the people about our country by consummation - don't make me laugh" and "what else? This is going to end in bed"

Who said consular work is dull?

[Explanatory note: We were told, believe it if you will, that “consummation” meant encouraging patrons of the nightclub to buy another drink!]

PUBLISHED IN MEINTJESKOP DITABA No III/1999