What was meant to be a day of celebration – the wedding ceremony of one of our members Uloma Agwu to Mr. Solomon Akiyesi at the Overcomers Church World Outreach in Aguda – was sullied by an ugly incident. Immediately following the praise and worship session and before the officiating commenced, a woman who claims to be the lawful wife of the groom disrupted the ceremony. She was accompanied by people who sought only to wreck havoc in the church. They were unruly and violent.
We regret the ugly series of events that followed this brash display. At the Overcomers Church, we do our due diligence to ensure a couple set to wed is right in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of God. To the best of our knowledge, Mr. Akiyesi, was unmarried. The Overcomers Church World Outreach regrets that the woman who disrupted the wedding chose such a time to do so. There is no ideal situation here, but it would have been right that she bring the case before church officials in a manner befitting a house of worship. This was not the case.
Last year, for example, I had to decide between a summer holiday and a new summer dress. I decided on the holiday, but as the cost of the flights and hotel added up, I realised I would have to raise an additional £400.
I began selling the summer clothes I had bought the previous spring. I now buy vintage, and rummage through charity shops.
Owning a Chanel suit, the price of which has risen over ten years from £1,000 to more than £5,000, is out of the question. Indeed, I can barely afford the charity shops in St John’s Wood, where I live.
Despite these savings, I no longer take a holiday in the winter and rarely eat in a fashionable restaurant, let alone visit places like the Ritz. It is a struggle to pay the rent.
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| Chinedu Ikedieze and Wife |
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie a renowned Nigerian novelist was born in Nigeria in 1977. She grew up in the university town of Nsukka, Enugu State where she attended primary and secondary schools, and briefly studied Medicine and Pharmacy. She then moved to the United States to attend college, graduating summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State University with a major in Communication and a minor in Political Science. She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and a Masters degree in African Studies from Yale University. She was a 2005-2006 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, where she taught introductory fiction. Chimamanda is the author of Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the 2007 Orange Prize For Fiction; and Purple Hibiscus, which won the 2005 Best First Book Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the 2004 Debut Fiction Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2009, her collection of short stories, The Thing around Your Neck was published. She was named one of the twenty most important fiction writers today under 40 years old by The New Yorker and was recently the guest speaker at the 2012 annual commonwealth lecture. She featured in the April 2012 edition of Time Magazine, celebrated as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. She currently divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
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| Solomon and Lilian Akiyesi (First wedding) |
