Black Girl from Pyongyang: In Search of My Identity

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Born the youngest daughter of Francisco Macias, the first president of Equatorial Guinea, she was transported to Pyongyang aged seven in 1979 as her father requested his friend Kim Il Sung to educate Monica and her two older siblings there. In 1979, aged only seven, Monica Macias was sent from West Africa to the unfamiliar surroundings of North Korea by her father, the President of Equatorial Guinea, to be educated under the guardianship of his ally, Kim Il Sung. In America people struggled to pay for basic medical treatment, while a visit to Equatorial Guinea taught her that African superstition put up equal barriers to life-saving care.

In charting her astonishing journey from childhood to today, she touches our hearts and challenges our thinking on international and race relations, colonialism and its impacts, and the meaning of home. However, Macias’s frequent declamations and the solutions she advances for fixing the world, when she stands on her soapbox, are far less interesting, and most of my notes on these are on how perplexing bias can be to those watching.So Monica enrolled in North Korea’s University of Light Industry, where she shared a hall with other foreign students. I used to tell myself, ‘I am Korean, I am Korean,’ while combing my hair to try to force it straight, but it never worked. The book, first published in 2013 in Korean, now published in English, is a diary of sorts, covering events and people over many decades.

I learned much more about Equatorial Guinea and its history since gaining independence from Spain than I had expected; however, that, unfortunately, is where my compliments end.Well, no, given what we come to learn about her through her own writing, but I know other people would have been capable of doing so. Despite all of this she makes some really good points about the cultures she has encountered along her travels in Spain, the U. However, just months after her arrival, her father, the then-president of Equatorial Guinea, Francisco Macías Nguema, was ousted in a bloody coup d'état by her cousin, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

Finally, and what most importantly inspired such a low rating, was the blatant erasure of Macias' father figures' negative impacts.But at the time, motherless, fatherless and wrenched from my home and the creature comforts of my early life in Korea, I found the lack of warmth and openness shattering, and I struggled to adapt. O n the dust jacket of Monica Macias’s memoir, Black Girl from Pyongyang, there’s an extraordinary photograph of her – then aged 5, in a white, frilly dress – flanked by the two men she considers her fathers. The young daughter of the President of Equatorial Guinea goes to North Korea in the 1970s for her education and possibly safety. And with memoir, it is essential to understand that there is always some degree of subjectivity as Monica interprets the way the western world in general views Francisco Macias and Kim Il Sung.

As social media algorithms herd us all into bubbles which “protect” us from the discomfort of differing worldviews, we could all learn a lot from her lifelong quest to challenge her own prejudices.I spoke disrespectfully to others and showed little regard for Korean social ranking according to age, for which one of my sister’s classmates took me to task. I joined them for their second-year primary school classes in the morning, and while they played in the afternoon, I attended first-year classes on my own to catch up.