In 1960, the Soviet Union founded a university in Moscow—soon to be called the Patrice Lumumba University—with the aim of educating students from newly independent states, many of whom came from African countries. Now called the People’s Friendship University of Russia, the university has a famous list of alumni including former heads of state of Central American and African countries, among others. But the Soviet Union wasn’t the only socialist place to offer educational opportunities to students in the developing world. Cuba, China, and North Korea also did and it’s the last that forms the subject of Monica Macias’s new memoir, Black Girl From Pyongyang: In Search of My Identity.
Macias was the daughter of Francisco Macias Nguema, the first president of Equatorial Guinea after the country gained independence from Spain in 1968. He sent his oldest son to study in Havana, and his three younger children to Pyongyang. And by sending them to Pyongyang, he put his children under the charge of Kim Il Sung. Macias writes about her fascinating childhood in her memoir, which was originally published in South Korea.
Her first trip to North Korea took place in 1977 on a state visit with her family. Macias found Pyongyang to be a beautiful city.
Compared to Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, Pyongyang was pristine. I began to fall in love with the city’s leafy beauty, with the ubiquitous weeping willows, the forsythias, cherry blossoms, magnolias, roses and azaleas. Our friendly housekeepers and cooks taught me my first Korean words and introduced me to Korean food. I discovered kimchi (fermented spicy cabbage), kimbap (sticky rice with vegetables or meat in a roll of dry seaweed), sinsollo (a round hot pot with meat or vegetables in soup), and so on.
Macias would return to Pyongyang two years later around the age of seven to study, beginning with language classes. Her brother Fran and sister Maribel also traveled with her to study in North Korea. Their mother accompanied them, but returned to Equatorial Guinea a few months after Macias was settled into the Mangyongdae Revolutionary Boarding School a half hour from the center of Pyongyang.
The school had been established after the colonial period to educate the children of Korean martyrs in the struggle against Japanese rule before the Second World War. In the late 1980s, the school began accepting the children of party members. The school then took a special step to accommodate my sister and me. On the order of Kim Il Sung, what was originally a boys’ school became mixed gender. Ten additional girls were brought in to create a form for me, and about the same number for my sister, who was fourteen.
It didn’t take long for Macias to gain fluency in Korean. She was at the age where she could shed her accent and would forever after sound like a native Korean speaker. But she always stood out due to her skin color and hair texture and did not feel included when she wasn’t invited to her friends’ homes on weekends or other school breaks. A close Korean school friend helped her obtain permission to spend time off campus on the weekends with her siblings and two sons of Mathieu Kerekou, the then-president of Benin.
Still, Macias missed her mother. Her father was arrested in 1979, soon after Macias moved to North Korea, and was subsequently executed in a coup by his own nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Obiang is still in power today.
Macias later studied textile engineering at the Pyongyang University of Light Industry and after graduation would go on to live with family in Spain and Equatorial Guinea. She later found work in China, South Korea, and the US, before going on to study in the UK. In London she earned a master’s degree in international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies and researched her father’s regime to learn if his reputation as a dictator was warranted.
Macias writes in the beginning of her memoir that her aim in telling her story is to show that politics is not always black and white. Her father had a reputation as a dictator, but she found proof that he was up against even more repressive forces, including his nephew and the former Spanish rulers. Likewise, her mother may have “abandoned” her children halfway across the world, but her parents both thought they would be safest in North Korea given the turbulent political situation at home. The United States was always portrayed in North Korea as evil, so Macias went out of her way to live in New York and take manual labor jobs so she could see what it was like to be in the working class there.
Perhaps the largest misconception she hopes to dispel was the West’s view of North Korea and Kim Il Sung. Macias admits to the problems in North Korea starting in the 1990s, but before that shows that she never lacked when it came to food, culture, and international friendships. She is one of the few non-Koreans now living in the West who grew up in North Korea. In her heart she’s Korean and hopes her story will show people that their preconceived notions of culture and identity aren’t always what meets the eye.