King Mswati of Swaziland has chosen a 16-year-old beauty queen to be his 13th wife after the annual reed dance ritual in which 20,000 bare-breasted maidens perform in his honour, hoping to catch his eye.
The maiden, a finalist in the Miss Teenage Swaziland competition, was whisked off for the much more modern routine of an Aids test - 40 per cent of the country's population are HIV positive - before being taken to the heavily protected seclusion of a royal guest house.
telegraph