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The Korea Times

Monica Macias stood out wherever she went in North Korea.
She was sent to Pyongyang in 1979 with her siblings, Maribel and Fran, by their father Francisco Macias Nguema, the first president of Equatorial Guinea. She was seven and lived there for 15 years.
Macias, now 50, recalls spending most of her early days in Pyongyang homesick and missing her mother.
She struggled to adapt to North Korean society and the strict military discipline at Mangyongdae Revolutionary Military Boarding School. She was constantly at the centre of attention because of her appearance.
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Despite the layered obstacles, Macias says she has fond childhood memories of her school life and classmates.
“They were nice to me,” she said. “We were kids. We laughed. Sometimes we fought … When I returned to school after a month of hospitalisation, they were so happy to have me back. Our relationship grew deeper.”
Macias, the author of Black Girl from Pyongyang: In Search of My Identity, is currently based in London. She finished her master’s degree in international relations in 2019 and has lived there since.
In her upcoming memoir, she sheds light on her childhood in Pyongyang, and life post-North Korea in Spain, New York, Seoul and London. The book is set to be released on March 9.

School life
Macias said she was indoctrinated with North Korea’s unique belief system which demonises the West. She was taught that the United States was the North’s enemy and the South was a puppet of the US.
She said she was outraged when she saw her Syrian friend sitting on the state newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun, which had featured then-North Korean leader Kim Il-sung on the front page.
She lectured him for being disrespectful. “He started laughing and said to me, ‘Oh, you say that because you grew up in Pyongyang.’ Then he left the scene,” she said.
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Macias said she did not understand his reaction back then. But after travelling the world following her departure from North Korea in 1994, she said she realised she had been brainwashed by a cult of personality.
She felt culture shock when she learned that the narratives she was taught in the North were very different from those in other countries.
“The truth that I had held as absolute as I grew up in Pyongyang started to teeter,” she said.

‘Thankful to Kim Il-sung’
Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of current North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, looked after Macias and her two other siblings throughout their stay there.
Macias’ father, Francisco Macias Nguema, was executed months after he sent his three children to North Korea. His nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, launched a military coup and ousted Francisco from the presidency. Nguema was put on trial, accused of having perpetrated atrocities, and shot by firing squad in September 1979.
Aware of the situation, Kim Il-sung checked in regularly, over the phone or through an aide, whether the three children were doing well at school.
“He was kind,” Macias recalled. “President Kim Il-sung was always a person whom I was and am thankful to – not on a political level but on a personal level.”
‘Abandoned by 3 countries’: the Chinese-North Koreans in South Korea
After rising to power, President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea sent an envoy to bring Macias’ four children back home from North Korea as well as Cuba, where Macias’ eldest brother, Teo, was studying at the time.
Then-Cuban leader Fidel Castro allowed Obiang’s envoy to take Teo back to Equatorial Guinea.
“Unlike Fidel Castro, Kim Il-sung refused to send us back to Equatorial Guinea. Instead, he offered a house to my mother who was visiting Pyongyang for medical treatment to stay and live with us in the North’s capital,” Macias said.


Insider’s view
Macias worked in a range of different jobs during her travels. She was a belly dancer in Spain, a hotel attendant in London, a jewellery designer in New York and a fashion designer in the posh Gangnam district of Seoul, where she lived for several years.
She received the media spotlight in 2013 when her memoir, I’m Monique from Pyongyang, was published in Korean.
Macias’ experiences living in the two Koreas helped her develop an insider’s view of inter-Korea issues.
She said she didn’t find any meaningful cultural differences between the two Koreas.
If there were any, she claimed, the differences might have come from a limited understanding of each other.
“Just as Northerners did not know about the South, Southerners did not know about the North. They had been cut off from each other for several generations and the emotional distance between them grew wider with every passing year,” she said in her memoir.
This article was first published on The Korea Times


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Monica Macias was 7 when was sent by her father, the first president of Equatorial Guinea, to live in Pyongyang with her sisters in 1979
They lived under the guardianship of then-leader Kim Il-sung, who allowed them to stay when their father was killed in a military coup


Monica Macias was 7 when was sent by her father, the first president of Equatorial Guinea, to live in Pyongyang with her sisters in 1979.
