http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/derbyshire/8447048.stm

Derbyshire businessman elected Nigerian king

Mr Ejiofor plans to retire to Nigeria to rule his province
A businessman from Derbyshire has been crowned king of a Nigerian province.

Christopher Ejiofor fled to Littleover from Nigeria as a war refugee nearly 40 years ago.

The 63-year-old built up a successful aircraft maintenance firm and sent thousands of pounds back to Ezeagu, in Enugu state, where he was born.

In recognition of his contributions he was elected the first Christian ruler of the province and crowned in an elaborate coronation at his £4m palace.

The coronation saw thousands of guests bring him gifts including rams, giant portraits and a cow.

Mr Ejiofor said he initially turned down the role because of the distance, but was persuaded to take it when the other candidates dropped out.

The committed Christian has now built a 10-bedroom palace where he plans to retire with his wife and four children.


When I left Nigeria it was on the last plane, which was being shot at

Christopher Ejiofor
As king he will organise a local government, oversee conservation projects, pardon criminals and bestow knighthoods.

Mr Ejiofor was forced to flee the country in 1970 after being arrested because he was a military adviser on the losing side of a civil war.

He started work at East Midlands Airport and was handed British citizenship.

He said: "It's a great honour and privilege to recognised by your people.

"I did not want this position but in the end I was convinced to put my name forward and I was unanimously elected.

"When I left Nigeria it was on the last plane, which was being shot at.

"We were refugees in Gabon and had lost everything.

"But hard work has been part of my ethos and although we were very deprived, we worked hard.

"England was a place of recuperation. It provided me with the platform to recover and expand my life portfolio because there are so many opportunities.

"I hope the experiences I have gained from England will help me to bring some sort of order out of the chaos which exists in this part of the world as there is so much potential."

more greese to his elbow.

Read this on BBC the other day. . . ]
Impressive. . .

He is Chiwetel Ejiofor's uncle


http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/, ofor-interview

And he has also known terrible tragedy. It would be a disservice to Ejiofor's talent and versatility to suggest he drew too greatly on his own experience for Othello but it's hard not to feel that his life so far has prepared him well for it.

Chiwe, as his friends know him, was born, the second of four children, in 1974 in Forest Gate, east London. His father, Arinze, a doctor and singer, and his mother, Obiajula, a pharmacist, both members of the Christian Igbo tribe, had fled religious persecution in Nigeria in the 1960s.

They worked hard - Arinze had to requalify to practise in London, and later studied for a PhD - in order to educate their children at the best public schools; in Chiwetel's case, Dulwich College. His mother remembers him as "a sweet child" who was "independent and artistic", while Ejiofor says his position as middle brother made him feel "safe".

But when he was 11, during a visit to Nigeria, the car in which Ejiofor and his father and three other men were travelling was hit by a taxi. His father and two of the men died instantly, and Ejiofor himself was flung through a door, breaking both arms and suffering head trauma.

He was in hospital for 10 weeks, and still bears a scar on his forehead. Although for years he denied that the incident caused him anything but sorrow, it seems gradually to have stoked a sort of Shakespearean rage at the random cruelty of the universe. "It f***ed me up quite a lot in the end," he said in 2004. "I think if your father dies in a car accident and you're 11, you get a bit pissed off about stuff because it's unfair."

Rarely seeing his widowed mother, as she was working all hours to keep him and his siblings in school, it was perhaps natural that he should incline towards drama "in order to express myself ".

As one of only a handful of black boys at Dulwich, early on he began performing ethnically non-specific roles, such as Macbeth and Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest, early on. The confidence and poise he now shows on stage and in person were, apparently, already in place. Far from seeming an outsider he was, according to one contemporary, the one who defended others against bullies.

He joined the National Youth Theatre at 17, and during his second stab at Othello at 19 was spotted by one of Steven Spielberg's scouts and cast as the African translator in his 1997 film Amistad. This upset his modest plan to join the Royal Shakespeare Company and work his way up to speaking parts. He briefly considered moving to LA, and would, indeed, later spend two years in New York, after meeting Mitchell. But early success did not turn his cool head, and all his major breakthroughs have been in the UK.

He first announced his talent to devastating effect, playing a young schizophrenic in Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange at the National Theatre in 2000. The performance won him the Evening Standard Award for Outstanding Newcomer, and the unending admiration of Penhall, who tells me: "He has an incredible immediacy, he's very bright but he also has a warmth and inclusiveness, an everyman quality, that makes him a great leading man."

hmm . . .

No doubt, these were men that represented us well abroad, people who still held on to the principle of dignity in labour. Not criminals, fraudsters and lazy fools we have today in UK as Nigerians, doing nothing but distroying the image of the nation.
More oil to your elbow man