Wanja Wohoro and Junior Nyong’o’s Intimate Garden Ceremony in Their Hometown of Nairobi
Wanja Wohoro and Junior Nyong’o’s meet-cute happened at a New Year’s Eve party in Kenya, just as the clock struck 2015. “We had quite a number of mutual friends, but had never met before that,” Wanja remembers. Wanja, a musician, had been living in Australia for the last nine years and was still studying there when she went home to Kenya for vacation. She showed up at the party with a bunch of girlfriends, and eventually, she and Junior—who is an actor and DJ—were introduced. “He made me a drink, and we got to talking about music and that was that, really: Love,” Wanja says. “From that day, things just progressed and grew despite us both going back to study in Florida and Sydney, respectively.”
They’d been dating for four years and eight months when Junior proposed. “Ever since we first met on New Year’s Eve, I knew I had to propose,” Junior admits. “Detail and sentiment is very important to me so I wanted to prioritize the ring. One of the earliest things Wanja and I bonded over was The Lord of the Rings, and a couple years back, I had come across a jewelry company based in New Zealand called Jens Hansen. They were the official ring makers of the One Ring in the movie,” he explains. After exchanging several emails with a Hansen consultant, Junior chose to inscribe a quote from Wanja’s favorite poem on the inside of the ring in Fëanorian characters, the same type of script inscribed on the LOTR ring.
The day of the proposal, they drove to get an early-morning breakfast. When they arrived, Junior blindfolded Wanja as they got into a golf cart to make their way to the proposal location. “I recited the poem before getting on one knee, and when she said yes, her family and friends came running out behind a bush. Her face when she saw her sister was priceless!”
The two were originally meant to get married on May 27, but like so many engaged couples in 2020, their plans were turned upside down by the spread of COVID-19. Junior had just returned to Nairobi from the States in mid March after spending three months in New York. “He changed his flight to come home a few days earlier as the COVID situation in New York City was becoming more intense,” Wanja says. “Thankfully, he was able to get home right before there was a lockdown on international flights. Once he retuned, we began to talk about the possibility of postponing the wedding indefinitely. Though the situation in Kenya was not too dire at that point, it was becoming clear that it just wasn’t looking possible to have the wedding as soon as May.”
They eventually sent out an email to all of their guests, canceling. “It was the right decision—the only decision really,” Wanja explains. “Things were changing week-to-week in terms of government directives, and we had to resign ourselves to the possibility of not having a wedding for quite some time, as we also had plans to move to another country by 2021.”
It was most important to them that they get legally married, so they tried to focus on making that happen at some point in the next six months. “It was definitely disappointing at first,” Wanja says. “We had made a lot of plans already, and it is always difficult to let go of the ideas and dreams you have for your future, or to readjust them. That has been 2020 in a nutshell for everyone. As a musician, I also had a lot of gigs and ‘moves’ set up for 2020, and it was also frustrating coming to terms with letting those go. But ultimately, we know how lucky we are to be together and to be safe and healthy, so we have both tried to just focus on the present. This year has been so difficult and horrendous for so many people, and so in a way, the wedding started to seem a little inconsequential in the grand scheme of everything.”
Just over a month ago, they decided to go ahead and do something, even though it would be completely different from the original wedding. “It had just become clear that no one really knows what the future is going to look like right now,” Wanja explains. “We decided rather than wait for the perfect moment to have the big wedding, we should do what we can right now for us and make it as beautiful, intimate, and special as possible.”
They decided to have their ceremony at Zereniti House, a boutique hotel in Tigoni, Kenya, with a lovely garden. Wanja used all of the original decor ideas she had for the first wedding and simply scaled them back for the much smaller guest list, which consisted of their immediate families and some of their bridal party. “Being outside was smart for health and safety reasons, but it also ended up being just what we wanted, with such a diverse range of flowers and flora framing the whole wedding,” Wanja explains. “The garden setting was so beautiful that it didn’t really need much!”
