By Sheriff Bojang Jr
Sent to Pyongyang as a child, Monica Macias was left behind when her father was executed and her mother disappeared. But decades later, she’s reclaiming her story. And his.
After months of scheduling misfires and clashing calendars, I finally manage to sit down with Monica Macias at a casual sandwich chain along Victoria Street in Westminster, London. She greets me with a quiet ease, carrying the kind of composure that comes from having lived several lives in one.
We settle by the window, drinking coffee (me) and coke (her), watching the cranes swing and commuters blur past, a fitting backdrop for a conversation shaped by exile, reinvention, and uneasy belonging.
Macias spent 15 years in Pyongyang, having arrived in 1979 at the age of seven alongside her siblings, Maribel and Fran. They were sent by their father, Francisco Macias Nguema – Equatorial Guinea’s first president – to his close ally, North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, who had promised to ensure their safety and education.
That same year, their father was overthrown and executed by firing squad in a military coup, leaving the children stranded in a country they barely understood.
In my heart, it’s not divided. Pyongyang laid the foundation for who I am today
Kim Il Sung kept his promise to take care of them, in a society that the rest of the world sees as secretive, authoritarian and isolated.
Macias’s formative years unfolded at the Mangyongdae Revolutionary School, an elite institution where she mingled with older children, learned Korean fluently, and took part in weapons training drills.
She remembers regular phone conversations with the country’s founder. To her, Pyongyang was not the dystopia described in Western headlines. “It was clean. Disciplined. Structured,” she says. “What I miss most are my school days, my friends.”
Absence of a mother
But that upbringing came at a cost. Macias’s mother, who had also been in Pyongyang for gallstone surgery, left North Korea shortly after her father’s execution and never returned. The abandonment left a deep scar. “My schoolmates would get visits from their mothers,” she says. “I didn’t have mine around.”
She remained in Pyongyang until 1994 – the year Kim Il Sung died – before setting off for Spain, the birthplace of her maternal grandfather. There, she began an agonising process of self-discovery, tracing her father’s history, trying to piece together the fractured puzzle of her past and confronting the narratives that had long painted him as a tyrant.
one of his greatest inspirations – his mother
North Korea, meanwhile, remains ruled by the Kim dynasty: first by Kim Il Sung, then his son Kim Jong Il, and now his grandson, Kim Jong Un.
Macias’s search for identity would later take her to Madrid, Malabo, New York, Seoul, and finally London, where she now lives. Along the way, she began to write – at first privately, then publicly – in an attempt to reclaim not only her story, but her father’s too.
My schoolmates would get visits from their mothers, I didn’t have mine around
Her first book, published in Korean in 2013, attracted modest attention. But her 2023 memoir Black Girl from Pyongyang brought her global recognition. Drawing on interviews with more than 3,000 people, including colonial officials, intellectuals and everyday Equatoguineans, Macias paints a radically different portrait of President Francisco Macias Nguema.
“Growing up, Kim Il Sung would tell us that our father was a good friend who fought for our country’s independence,” she recalls. “But when I arrived in the West, I encountered the negative image of him.”
Through her own research, she became convinced that her father was the target of a coordinated political plot. “They first destroyed his reputation with lies, then justified his assassination. It was the classic colonial playbook,” she argues.
She is not in denial about the authoritarian nature of his rule, though. “Was my father a dictator? By political science definitions, yes. He centralised power. But was he a mass killer? Absolutely not.”
Today, Macias has a blurred mental image of her father. “If I didn’t have a photo, I wouldn’t have recognised him.”
An insider in exile
Her life has unfolded in the margins: a Black child raised in East Asia, a socialist in the West, an insider who was also an outsider. In North Korea, Macias was racially different but culturally embedded. “Korean culture was all I knew. I had no exposure to Africa growing up,” she says.
Macias’s first real cultural reckoning came not in Pyongyang, but years later in Spain, where questions of identity deepened. “In Zaragoza, I was treated as the outsider. That’s where the culture shock hit me hard. I hadn’t realised how deeply North Korean values were embedded in me,” she says.
Yet she doesn’t view her upbringing as a burden, but as a lens, one that allows her to interrogate multiple worldviews. “I’ve lived in capitalist, socialist and postcolonial societies. That taught me no country is inherently good or evil. That’s not a coping mechanism. It’s a conclusion.”
Still, her dual identity confounds many. “People think my perspective on North Korea comes from privilege,” says Macias. “A young white woman once reviewed my book and said that because I was privileged, my perspective was biased. She completely ignored intersectionality.”
Macias bristles at critics who dismiss her voice. “Yes, being born a president’s daughter gave me certain privileges, but being Black in a racially hierarchical world puts me at a disadvantage. Privilege doesn’t cancel out intellectual ability. What matters is self-awareness and using whatever privilege you have to uplift others.”
Today, Macias’s loyalties are not divided, but multiplied. She feels emotional and physical attachment not just to North Korea, but to the entire Korean peninsula. “In my heart, it’s not divided. Pyongyang laid the foundation for who I am today.”
In 2004, after spending 10 years in Spain, Macias returned to North Korea, a visit she describes as both surreal and emotional. “It was a very difficult period for the country,” she recalls, referencing the deep economic strain and isolation North Korea faced at the time.
Reconciling with the past
Asked whether she has closure about her father’s execution, she doesn’t hesitate. “Yes. He was the victim of both internal and external enemies. But I hold no hatred. Only understanding.
That sense of resolution extends to her mother, too, once described by Macias as a stranger, someone she felt no love or attachment for. In her essay Losing My Mother Tongue, she reflects on the long silence that stretched between them. But has that silence healed? “Absolutely,” she says without hesitation. “As you grow, you learn to put yourself in other people’s shoes.”
Macias, who is an associate lecturer in fashion marketing and global cultures at University of the Arts (UAL) in London, is often asked what was harder: living her story or writing it. “Writing was cathartic,” she says. “But the hardest part was choosing what to leave out.”
What did Pyongyang give her that the West never could? “Confucian values.”
And a message to her younger self? She smiles: “Well done, Monica. You managed incredibly well.”
