Feature: Shining Light International Wedding and Event Planning Services
Published: 5 May, 2011
by SIMON WROE
IT is the day of the royal wedding and a woman known as “Queen” or “Elizabeth” is parading around a patch of garden behind Holloway Road, wiggling her hips like Marilyn Monroe.
Her Royal Highness Queen Mary Rose Elizabeth Dikechioma Azubuike, to give the full name on her business cards, is demonstrating “a glamorous walk for the lady of the day” customary at weddings in Nigeria, where she is the daughter of a tribal chief.
Weddings are Queen Dikechioma’s business (she avoids the name “Queen Elizabeth” lest she is confused with someone else) and she claims to have organised nearly 3,000 nuptials since she started her career in Lagos in 1979.
Her company, Shining Light International Wedding and Event Planning, offers “Celebrity, Superstar, Royal and Traditional” ceremonies, as well as hair and beauty services, dressmaking and catering. Since 1993, when she moved to England, all these businesses have been organised from her Islington council flat.
But today the many enterprises of Queen Dikechioma are silent as she and her family (she has four daughters and a son, all aged between nine and 15) watch Prince William and Kate Middleton tie the knot on television.
“When the bride gets to the husband, the way the man holds the hand of the bride is very important. To see the amount of love,” she says as Miss Middleton approaches the prince at the altar.
“You see? The romance is there. The smile is there. The communication is there. Now I am happy! This is the day!”
In a Nigerian royal wedding, the bride fetches water from a spring, performs “a dance of obedience” for the groom and offers him a drink from “the cup of acceptance”. Queen Dikechioma has organised such weddings in her homeland, but in England she has struggled to attract celebrity clients.
“Superstars here, when they look at me, they say: ‘Oh, this woman living in a council flat’, but I got the talent. I can design whole weddings with my eyes closed,” she says.
“Don’t look at the environment. Look at what you are going to achieve. There’s a lot of people who have talent and their talent is wasted. That is when you are thinking of evil.”
Business is in the Queen’s blood. She is a descendant of King Jaja of Opobo, a 19th-century merchant prince who raised himself from slavery to become a powerful palm oil trader and, for a time, a houseguest of Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace.
According to legend, the British became so frustrated by his monopoly in the region that they poisoned him with a cup of tea.
From the age of five, Queen Dikechioma says, she was selling bread her mother had made and doing the nails of the older girls at her convent school for pocket money.
“I was always in a positive life, thank God. I was soaked in a good way by my parents, a spiritual way, and I don’t put my hand in evil.”
Keen to instil the same values in her children, she has plastered the walls of her home and garden with pictures of weddings, newspaper headlines and lists of the world’s richest people. Written on many of the photos is her label: “£11.8M/B” (11 and 8 are the months her daughters were born, M/B stands for million/billion).
“I want to raise millionaires too,” she says. “I’m training my children. Sometimes they look at this and think ‘Mummy is a good woman’. When they want to follow bad people they won’t. But it’s not just for my children. Somebody who carries a knife, he can see this. He will be touched and throw away the knife and start a good life.”
The Queen has many idols: Simon Cowell, Colonel Sanders, the Pope and Lady Gaga are just a few. But her greatest source of inspiration is her own wedding day, 17 years ago, when she married her husband Anthony, a chartered surveyor.
“It was the happiest day of my life,” she says. “I keep my wedding dress in a special box and the day I die that is what I’m going to wear.”
Overhead, the drone of an aeroplane engine drowns out the television.
It is the Lancaster bomber from the royal flyover, flanked by the Spitfire and Hurricane. Queen Dikechioma and her family spill out into the garden and watch the planes until they disappear behind the rooftops.
“This is the day!” says the Queen again. “Kate secures the man!”
• Shining Light International Wedding and Event Planning Services can be contacted on 020 7619 9363 or via email: queendikechioma@hotmail.co.uk