The author and daughter of Equatorial Guinea’s former dictator Francisco Macías Nguema reflects on her childhood spent in exile in North Korea.
In London, at least, Monica Macias can disappear into the crowd. When she arrived in the city in 2014, she found work as a hotel cleaner. The work was physically demanding, and her bosses made her life so stressful that her hair started to fall out. She sought legal advice and was told that as a black woman and an immigrant, it would be prudent to stay quiet.
The other chambermaids were also mostly recent immigrants, and if they were curious about this quietly determined woman with a gentle, hard-to-place accent, they would never have guessed her background. The accent is Korean, her first language, via Spanish, her second. Her father was Francisco Macias Nguema, the first president of Equatorial Guinea, in West Africa, but she spent most of her childhood in North Korea. In 1979, when she was seven, her father was deposed and executed by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, a kleptocratic dictator who is still president today. Macias and two of her siblings were left in the care of their father’s ally, the North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, in Pyongyang. (Her mother returned to Equatorial Guinea to protect Macias’s eldest brother, Teo.