Black Girl from Pyongyang: In Search of My Identity

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The North Korean leader regularly checked in on her by phone and helped her complete her university education at Pyongyang University of Light Industry. I did not understand why I had to live in that boarding school under such strict discipline at only eight years old. He will take care of you and put you into whichever school he considers is right for your education.

Following her father's trial and execution by firing squad, Macías, her mother, and her two siblings were left stranded in North Korea. In New York (where she designed and sold jewellery) she was depressed by the American obsession with money and began to suspect that capitalism built just as many “fences in the mind” as communism.

Finally, and what most importantly inspired such a low rating, was the blatant erasure of Macias' father figures' negative impacts. 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. My life became a structured one, dominated by discipline, in which loneliness was my bosom companion. Join Brixton Library’s Radical Readers to discuss the extraordinary true story of a West African girl’s upbringing in North Korea under the protection of President Kim Il Sung.

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. As she moved to Spain after receiving an education, she felt the need to learn where she came from and reconciliate the different parts of her story and origins. An interesting story about a young Black girl from Equatorial Guinea who grows up and attends school in North Korea. He was found guilty on 29 September 1979 and, with no right of appeal, executed by firing squad on the same day. Her “unusual” life story certainly gives her a unique vantage point from which to comment on global divisions.When she came of age, she was offered the chance by Kim Il Sung either to stay or leave, and in the book she documents her decision to leave North Korea and discover her heritage in Spain and Equatorial Guinea, before moving to the US, South Korea and the UK. It was as if I had walked onto a movie set and was reciting my lines of dialogue from an approved script. It’s an investigative story to understand her true father, a powerful but controversial figure, the real man behind his many personas. But a visit to Seoul taught her that South Koreans were just as blind to the humanity of those in the North as her Northern friends were to that of those in the South. At every step, she had to reckon with her own ideas about the West and its damning perceptions of her adoptive homeland,” the publisher said.

In Spain she begins to learn about the world, about other people besides North Koreans, and investigates the circumstances of her father’s death. She interviewed 3,000 witnesses to his regime and concluded that he was not directly responsible for the “heinous” crimes committed during his tenure. Macias’ experiences living in the two Koreas helped her develop an insider’s view of inter-Korea issues. She attempts to make a dictator look sympathetic, and yet provides no reason for our sympathy beyond the fact that she lived alongside him. Along the way she tried to tell her story and reconcile her personal experience of Francois Macias and Kim Il-sung as kindly men with their Western reputation as brutal dictators.Hardly representative however and the author, although enjoying remarkable freedoms, seems ignorant to the circumstances of ordinary North Koreans. 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.