When Uduak Udoh was visiting family and friends in Detroit, the last thing on her mind was dating. However, her cousin’s wife had other plans.
Attending school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Uduak, originally from Nigeria, was far from home and had just lost her mother. Since she couldn’t go home for the funeral, she decided to visit family in Detroit.
“They wanted me to come up for a few days so I could be with family,” Uduak recalls. “My cousin’s wife is a good friend, and she asked if I was dating anybody, and said there was someone she really wanted me to meet. I was not in the mindset, though.”
She did end up meeting Ekong Bassey that weekend, though. Her cousin’s wife was persistent, she laughs, and fortunately, so was Ekong.
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After that first date, Uduak didn’t plan to see Ekong again, but he convinced her otherwise. She skeptically went out with him a second time, but still didn’t think there was anything there.
“That one was actually worse than the first,” Uduak says of their second date. “But he kept pursuing me. We’d talk on the phone, and my heart really started to warm to him.”
So much so that when he popped the question on her birthday weekend in Las Vegas, she quickly said yes.
Though the couple met in Detroit, they are from the same state in Nigeria, so it was important to them to follow their country’s traditions. There would be a traditional Nigerian wedding, and then what Uduak refers to as their white wedding.
That traditional wedding would take place in their hometown in Nigeria. However, there would be two key players missing–the bride and the groom. Both were still in school getting their Ph.D.s, so they couldn’t travel. Their families took over and hosted the ceremony, which is more of a formal meeting of the two families and
an engagement.
“It’s a whole long process where you state the purpose of being there,” Uduak says of the traditional ceremony. “They did the whole traditional ceremony without us there. Our families met and talked.”
There were pictures from their engagement session on display at the ceremony, and when they hosted their white wedding one month later, their families were there to help them celebrate.
Since Uduak was finishing up school in Birmingham, they decided to have the wedding there, and she wanted it to be classic Birmingham. They chose the newly-renovated Tutwiler hotel for their ceremony and reception.
Although this was their white wedding, the couple still added some traditional Nigerian touches.
A Nigerian dance group from Atlanta provided entertainment, and as is tradition in their home country, guests showered the couple with money to celebrate their union.
The bride wore a lace mermaid dress. Instead of a long veil, she went with a short birdcage. Uduak’s bridesmaids all wore dresses in the same shade of pink, yet in different styles. The groom wore a gray tuxedo.
Uduak’s flowers were soft shades of pink and white. In memory of Uduak’s mother, the florist attached a picture of her mother to Uduak’s bouquet.
“That really almost made me cry,” she said. “It was just wonderful. It really made it feel like she was there with me.”
Though Uduak initially found it difficult to date again after the death of her mom, she knows now she was meant to meet Ekong that weekend in Detroit. The couple, now living in Springfield, Missouri, just welcomed their first baby.
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