An African leader’s daughter in Pyongyang

MONIQUE Macias spent 15 years growing up as an exile in Pyongyang and her school days firing Kalashnikov rifles at the same prestigious military academy where Kim Jong-il earned his first stripes as heir to North Korea’s seat of power.
“All my childhood memories start from when I arrived on that plane in Pyongyang,” said Macias, the youngest daughter of an African president-turned-dictator. “I know how Koreans think and how to talk to them because they taught me. They made me.”
This week, state media in North Korea criticised a report by a US think-tank on scenarios for the collapse of a country with a grim record of famine, prison camps and nuclear brinkmanship — an event that Macias sees as unlikely.
“There are people in North Korea who know that this is not the right way to live,” she said in Seoul. “I don’t think it’s going to collapse easily.

What I’ll say is that it can open up like China but very, very slowly.”
Chirpy, bubbly and now in her 40s, Macias has published her memoirs — I’m Monique, From Pyongyang — in Korean about an unusual upbringing decided upon by her father Francisco Macias Nguema, whose reign in Equatorial Guinea ended with his trial and execution in the late 1970s.
Shortly before his death, and with few friends left, Macias Nguema turned to North Korea for help and sent his wife and children to Pyongyang, where they would spend the next decade and a half.
The relationship between the two fringe states was not unusual in the Cold War tension of the time. North Korea strived to build ties with smaller nations stuck on the periphery of the splits that pitted the US and its allies against the Soviet Union, as well as China and other communist countries.
Being one of very few black people in Pyongyang and living in a strange country taught Macias to see the world differently. This, she said, is what inspired her to publish her memoirs now, with tensions between the Koreas high and relations at a low.
“Although North and South say they want unification, they don’t actually know each other as people,” she said. “If we want unification, we have to bury prejudice.”
Macias, who left North Korea in 1994 and spends time with family in Spain, still speaks Korean as her first language after those formative years in Pyongyang with children of the elite. On social occasions, she said, the country’s founding leader, Kim Il-sung, would nag her to study hard, which made him seem like a “typical Korean grandfather”.
At the Mangyongdae Revolutionary School, the uniform worn by Macias and her sister and brother was a military-style jacket with officer’s pips on the epaulettes and a green cap emblazoned with a shiny red star. Her education was peppered with survival courses and drills.
“The first week, all of us were so hungry after shooting, climbing and running every day that we ate our weekly rations in three days and, for the other four days, we were hungry,” she said.