Coming 2 America by Dr John Ayoola Akinyemi

Coming 2 America by Dr. John Ayoola Akinyemi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The American Dream, Unpolished and Real...

Most memoirs these days feel a little too perfect. All polished edges and careful curation. But Dr. John Ayoola Akinyemi's Coming 2 America: This is a Story about a Fifteen-Year-Old African Girl lands differently—like finding a handwritten letter tucked in your mailbox, still warm with feeling. This slim 88-page tribute to his late wife Agnes isn't just her story. It's a love letter—to resilience, to faith, to the difficult, beautiful reality of the American Dream.

Agnes Ndungwa Akinyemi was a Kikamba girl from Kenya's Kangundo District who boarded a plane to America at fifteen. What unfolds isn't some glossy rags-to-riches tale. It's quieter than that, more real. Through her husband's tender gaze, we meet the "Rock"—a woman who graduated Madonna High School in Aurora, earned her Master's in Microbiology from Howard, pursued a PhD at UMBC, and spent 24 years as a microbiologist at Aberdeen Proving Ground. But it's the in-between moments that stick with you: the scholarships earned through sheer determination, the loneliness of navigating a foreign country as a young Black woman, the girl mending her own boarding school uniforms who became a federal retiree.

Akinyemi makes it deeply personal. His preface, written with the raw ache of losing Agnes to dementia in June 2021, pulls you right in. He wrestles with the title (From Nobody to Somebody: Only in America felt too close to Eddie Murphy's movie), and suddenly he's not just a biographer—he's a widower sorting through memories, trying to honor the woman whose smile dazzled him. Their origin story is pure magic: 1964, a Syrian classmate mentions "an African girl in town," John makes a phone call, shows up for what was supposed to be five minutes, and stays a lifetime. "From now on, it is 'my' 'story'!" he writes, dropping the 'h' from "history." It's a small flourish, but you feel his heart in it—Yoruba warmth meeting Kikamba pride.

The cultural details really bring this alive. Agnes's Kenyan childhood unfolds in vivid snapshots: colonial-era Machakos Girls School where European teachers lived lavishly while African staff biked in from town. Sunday church marches that left her bewildered. Independence Day rituals of scrubbing floors in yellow linens, Christmas feasts of ischio—that rich mash of corn, beans, and meat. These aren't just pretty memories; they shaped her. She learned empathy young, comforting classmates whose parents didn't show up at school events, introducing them to her own loving family. Akinyemi knows the biographer's curse—"not enough time or space"—but every detail he chooses feels alive and necessary.

If there's a wish here, it's for more pages. At 88, the book moves fast—you could read it in an afternoon—but you're left wanting deeper access to Agnes's interior life after America. We glimpse her NIH work, her doctoral path, but hunger for more. Still, maybe that restraint is the point. This is a love story, after all—not just between John and Agnes over fifty years, but her love for Kenya, for America, for family who gathered at her bedside at the end.

Reading Coming 2 America now, with migration stories swirling everywhere, it feels both urgent and eternal. That old truth: here, a "nobody" can become a "somebody" through grit and grace. It's medicine for anyone who's climbed from the bottom, a reminder that the best lives aren't measured in accolades but in quiet faith—in God, in yourself, in each other.

If you need inspiration served with humility, pick this one up. You'll close it feeling grateful, maybe a little teary, thinking of the rocks in your own life. Five stars. And a quiet amen to stories like Agnes's that make this country shine. Highly recommended.

View all my reviews