Simaneka & Nakeba
Eight years, two countries, one very spilled cheese board. This is how we got here.
March 2019 · A café in the Cape Town city bowl
It had been raining for three days. Maria ran into a tiny café on Buitenkant Street to wait out the worst of it; Daniel was already there, at the only table left, surrounded by bridge drawings.
He offered her half the table. She asked what he was drawing. Four hours, two pots of coffee and one very patient waiter later, the rain had stopped — and neither of us had noticed.
April 2019 · Stellenbosch
A picnic at a wine farm outside Stellenbosch. Daniel brought a cheese board he had spent all morning arranging and dropped it, face down, within the first ten minutes.
Maria laughed so hard she cried, and somewhere between the crackers on the grass and the second glass of Pinotage, it stopped feeling like a first date at all.
December 2019 · Sossusvlei, Namibia
Daniel took Maria home. We drove the long gravel roads from Windhoek, met an entire village worth of aunts, and climbed Big Daddy dune in the dark to watch the sun turn the Namib red.
At the top, out of breath and covered in sand, Maria said she had never seen anything so beautiful. Daniel, who was not looking at the dunes, quietly agreed.
Winter 2020 · Cape Town
The world went quiet that year, and we found ourselves in one small flat with a sourdough starter called Gerald, a jigsaw puzzle of the Namib with three pieces missing, and nowhere else to be.
It should have been hard. Instead, one ordinary evening, cooking side by side with the radio on, we both realised the same thing at the same time: home was not a place anymore.
6 September 2025 · Chapman's Peak, Cape Town
Daniel said he needed sunset photographs of Chapman's Peak Drive for work. Maria, who knows him far too well, still didn't suspect a thing.
The full story is just below — but the short version is: she said yes before he had finished the question.
20 March 2027 · Franschhoek
Eight years after a rainy afternoon in a crowded café, we are getting married in the valley where we spent our very first weekend away — surrounded by the people who made us who we are.
The best chapter starts here. We would love you to be there for the first page.
The proposal
6 September 2025
Chapman's Peak, Cape Town
Daniel told Maria he needed sunset photographs of Chapman's Peak Drive for a project at work. He packed the camera, a blanket, a flask of rooibos and — wrapped in a lens cloth at the very bottom of the bag — a ring that had been hiding in his sock drawer for three months.
As the sun dropped towards the Atlantic, he handed her the camera to check the light. On the screen, instead of the view, was a photograph he had taken that morning: a handwritten note that said simply, Turn around.
She turned. He was on one knee. Maria says she said yes before he had finished the question; Daniel maintains he never got further than "Will you". Both of our families, it turned out, were waiting at a restaurant in Hout Bay — they had known for weeks, and not one of them had said a word.
Meet the couple
The Groom
Born in Windhoek and raised on his grandmother's stories from the north, Daniel is a civil engineer who designs the bridges most people never notice — which, he says, is the whole point.
He runs before sunrise, plays far too much Abdullah Ibrahim on vinyl and believes there is no problem a slow Sunday braai cannot solve. He has never once been on time for anything, except the day he met Maria.
“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.”
The Bride
Maria grew up between the vineyards of Stellenbosch and the cold Atlantic of her family's holidays in Paternoster. She is a landscape architect who can name every fynbos species on Table Mountain and will happily stop the car to show you one.
She bakes sourdough on Saturdays, swims in the sea all year round and keeps a notebook of every place she and Daniel have promised to see together. It is getting very full.
“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach.
Two letters, written on the first anniversary of our engagement and sealed until now.