Black Girl from Pyongyang: In Search of My Identity

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This book is fascinating on the level of the uniqueness of Macias’s rather improbable perspective, with wonderful biographical details. Her decision to leave was driven by her desire to see the outside world, to connect to her past, and to find out whether her father really was a cruel dictator. 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. Before that, I’d assumed my father wasn’t alive because my classmates were fatherless as well, and I’d invented a reason why: natural causes. At the beginning of the book, she promises to outline evidence that her father was not as bad as he was portrayed to be, and was rather the victim of circumstances, but she does not do this.

I did not understand why I had to live in that boarding school under such strict discipline at only eight years old.Growing up as a Black girl from Pyongyang In an extract from her memoir, Monica Macias reckons with the realities of moving from West Africa to North Korea under the guardianship of Kim Il-Sung. I’ll have to admit my lack of knowledge about the history of Equatorial Guinea might hinder me from wholly understanding Monica’s narrative. In 2013, Macías gained media attention following the publication of her memoir, I'm Monique from Pyongyang ( Korean: 나는 평양의 모니카입니다), which was written in Korean. As a consequence, in the aftermath of decolonisation there were no proper educational institutions in Equatorial Guinea.

The young daughter of the President of Equatorial Guinea goes to North Korea in the 1970s for her education and possibly safety. It’s an investigative story to understand her true father, a powerful but controversial figure, the real man behind his many personas.With his family’s life in danger from his putative enemies, and with Communist nations reaching out to offer Macias assistance, he sent his wife and children to North Korea to live and be educated under the stewardship of Kim Il Sung, who the author refers to as her adopted father, and of whom she speaks very fondly.