Black Girl from Pyongyang by Monica Macias

“That was unacceptable to them,” she says. When he returned to the Mangyongdae Revolutionary School, then headed by Kim Il-sung's nephew, he sneaked out one night and walked for hours to find his sister, who lived in the center of the city. She says that she went on a hunger strike for a month and ended up in a hospital. When her mother returned after a few years, Macías could not communicate with her. She forgot Spanish and the Fang language, and she only spoke Korean. She rejected everything that she had to do with Spain ”. “I turned everything down after my mother left. In Pyongyang, she was the only black girl in her class. Macías, as a girl, in the uniform of the North Korean army, next to a highway near Pyongyang. He has few memories of his biological father, only an incomplete vision of him, turning his back on her in a field in Equatorial Guinea or on a trip to North Korea, a pro-Soviet country allied with Equatorial Guinea. He says that he has gone to therapy to try to remember, but has had no results. “I think it's because of the trauma,” he says. Macías does not remember anything about his life before arriving in North Korea. “I want to give a different perspective on the places I have left,” Monica said when I met her in Soho, London, where she now lives, impeccable in her white flowered dress and pearl earrings.Īfter living in Spain, South Korea, Equatorial Guinea and China, she settled in the British capital and now works in a clothing store near the center. (The black girl from Pyongyang the book still does not have a Spanish publisher), about her 15 years in North Korea.

Mónica Macías' life is so extraordinary that it seems like fiction. She was sent to North Korea under the protection of Kim Il-sung in 1979, aged seven, after her father suspected a coup was coming.įrancisco Macías Nguema was executed that same year. She is the biological daughter of dictator Francisco Macías Nguema, the first president of Equatorial Guinea, in Central Africa, who was responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century - including genocide, mass murder and treason.

She was raised, she says, 'with two parents.' Macías grew up in exile: she was a black girl in a military boarding school in Pyongyang. The gift was from her adoptive father, the founder and president of North Korea, Kim Il-sung. On December 31, she received a basket of food at her boarding school and her classmates looked at her with envy when she took her fruits, soft drinks and sweets from her.īut she Macías did not have a traditional education. Like many children who grew up in the eighties, Mónica Macías was excited about the New Year's gift that her father gave her every year.

Black Girl from Pyongyang by Monica Macias