MJoTAtalks: Art Bearing Witness
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MC Iroko Auto
Services LLC is a one-stop shop for all types of motor vehicles. The
owner is Mr Malachy C Orji, who is remarkable in several ways.
He is a trained
aeronautical engineer, which means after he qualified as an electrical
engineer, he took extra training and for some decades made sure the
planes flying out of Lagos and Philadelphia were going to be able to
take off, fly, and land safely. After the aeronautical meltdown after
9/11; Mr Orji started an auto business.
Except
he is not Mr Orji. He is High Chief MC Orji. His community thought so
much of him that they elected him their leader; he is the only High
Chief in the Igbo Nigerian community in Pennsylvania.
The High
Chief is clearly an engineer of the neat, obsessive, safe kind. I wandered
into his shop when I couldn't find his brother, who owns the banquet
hall called African Cultural Center. The first thing I saw was the carpet on the floor. Wow.
The
High Chief is not a man young in years, but exceedingly young in his
vision. He is still expanding his auto-shop, in the pictures on the page
describing his business (MC Iroko Services LLC) you can see he is adding workspace, building a second facility.
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Top picture. High Chief MC Iroko. Below, with Dr Samuel Quartey in Philadelphia's Belmont Mansion after a traditional Ghanaian ceremony in which Dr Quartey installed 2 Americans as Ghanaian kings and 2 as Ghanaian queens. Next picture, the High Chief is the first-seated guest at the Igbo Roman Catholic Christmas party on Dec 11, 2011. Seated second is another Igbo Chief, Chief Stanley Okoro.
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Below, the High Chief when he was Engineer M Orji at Nigeria Airways in Lagos in the 1990s.
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MJoTAtalks, click here
-MJoTAtalks:
Art Bearing Witness with Omenihu Amachi, click here
-MJoTAtalks: Health with MJoTA publisher, click here
-MJoTAtalks: Fiction with MJoTA publisher, click here
-MJoTAtalks: Music with Irving Jean-Baptiste, click here
-MJoTAtalks: Youth with Carlos Ginsburg, click here
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High Chief MC Orji is an Igbo. The massacre of tens of thousands of Igbos led to the state of Biafra being declared in 1967; which led to a deadly civil war in Nigeria that lasted 3 years and resulted in millions in Biafra starving to death.
Like all young Nigerians living in Biafra at that time, the High Chief has a harrowing story of survival and death in his own family.
That he lived was largely because of the grace of the Roman Catholic Church. Like most Igbos, the High Chief is a practicing Roman Catholic.
For videos from Biafra, click here.
For stories from Biafra published in Medical Journal of Therapeutics Africa, click here.
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