Black Girl from Pyongyang: In Search of my Identity
By Monica Macias
Duckworth, 2023

There is a dearth of authentic narratives about life in contemporary North Korea. It remains among the world’s most closed countries. The scanty evidence we do have is based primarily on a mix of diplomatic reports, (not very representative) defector memories (invariably renumerated for sensationalism), and the sparse observations of rare visitors. Travel stories follow the DPRK’s spasmodic periods of socialist tourism, but naturally these tend to be partisan. Indeed, accounts from dictatorships are complex sources for IR students. The author knows South Korea well (having written an account of the UN Cemetery at Pusan) but served only a month in the DPRK assisting the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA). From that experience, I would suggest that in contrast to most UN assignments involving fluid contact with local staff, service in DPRK is a little more akin to life as an astronaut. We might as well have been on the moon, for all the genuine contact we had with local North Koreans. All resources had to be provisioned by the agency, and save for some DPRK military officers minding us, we were the sole inhabitants of a hotel which, in winter, still had no heating and very little electricity. The contact we had with DPRK interlocuters was limited to staccato conversions on very basic issues of operational protocol.

My wordy introduction is part argument that while this recent book is an account of an elitist childhood from a person whose bizarre circumstances uniquely predispose her to the country, such narratives are rare. The paucity of first-hand accounts from the DPRK make these childhood recollections invaluable. Monica Macias was of the fold of two dictators. The daughter of assassinated President of Equatorial Guinea, she was sent in 1979 to the DPRK under the guardianship of Kim Il Sung. Her father was executed in a subsequent coup, and her mother was uncontactable for years. Residing at a military boarding school and then industrial university, her field of contact with grassroots North Korean society was narrow. Nevertheless, she retained an affection for its people, long after she had left. Given her late father’s close relationship with the Kims, she is far from an impartial witness. However, she writes with frankness about the country she got to know intimately. For all of these reasons, and with observations about the country being so rare, this memoir augments the comparative radio silence characterising our DPRK knowledge-base.

It is clear from the book that despite the oppression of a secretive state, even official minders and fellow-students gave their opinions. They became in some sense “co-conspirators” in opening some fragments of a veil on real life. There is gossip, light criticism and precious vignettes of life in a real Korea. Monica speaks honestly about how they were taught, “America you shall hate…but South Korea you shall pity”. Her school regarded Americans as a dangerous enemy. However, respect and mutual learning flourish, even in such an apparently inhospitable environment. Her friends tease her beyond official newsprint. She learns of famine and hardship in the countryside. Even socializing with students, she gains information about economic failures, and popular resistance. She realizes her situation is on par with the state’s senior Party cadre, and when she makes unauthorized visits outside her complex, she identifies inequality and contradictions to the Kim gospel.

As for her life before Korea, she writes, “My memory box was black,” recalling little of Guinea. When she arrived in Spain in her 20s, she begins to put the pieces together of the inconvenient truth about her past. At Spanish immigration, she is confronted with a counter-narrative to DPRK propaganda.

“My mind churned with what those guards were whispering about North Korea, and about my father; the dictator of dictators, a despicable human being. Kim Il Sung had always told us that our father was a good friend, a good person. I had always imagined him as a hero who fought for the independence of our country.”

Thus, the consistent story-line of “Black Girl from Pyongyang” is the memoir of a woman who, having suffered cultural and political shocks as a teen and young adult, left North Korea in search of her identity and to reconcile her West-African background with the Kim regime. Monica had (by then) spent over a decade under Kim’s guardianship. The three children entered the elite Mangyongdae Revolutionary School, formed for the orphaned children of DPRK officers. Apart from two sons of Benin’s president who had also been sent to the DPRK, Monica and her siblings were the only Africans in the school. There were some other foreigners, notably Chinese and Syrians. In contrast to her brother Fran, who integrated easily, Monica writes that her darker complexion and tallness made her a kind of awkward curiosity. Her self-security then further crumbles as her father’s story unravels, and she begins to feel fraudulent.

She learns that one of her father’s nephews had overthrown her father and executed him just after her arrival in Pyongyang. After graduating from Mangyongdae, Monica studied at Pyongyang’s Han Tok Su University of Light Industry. She lived at the Haebangsan Hotel with other foreign students, enjoying western music at the Changgwangsan discotheque. She used a Health Complex, attended piano lessons at the Taedonggang Diplomatic Club, and shopped at the Rakwon Department Store. She watched Chinese, Russian and other foreign movies on television. Her social life was the exact opposite of most North Koreans, but even from this international bubble she was still able to garner some insights into negative feelings about the DPRK regime, and the juxtaposition between her elite life and the micro-endurance of most North Koreans. Even a single step outside her college bubble revealed that the lives of the ordinary citizens of the DPRK could not have differed more. She began to get a sense that the regime was built upon its self-sustenance, at all costs. The leaders were unquestioned, and yet it was apparent that at the street level, people merely paid lip-service to a regime playbook. Their minds were less closed than the rituals of victory celebrations might suggest. Moreover, much of a generic Korean socializing culture remained intact. When they gathered for Korean festivals, their indigenous traditions, not the Kims, were centre-stage. Drinking and merry-making in public parks, Koreans were less guarded about shortages and hardship.

So, Monica began questioning her life in North Korea, and its propaganda. Two incidents caused her to doubt regime-credibility. A Syrian classmate mocking her for her deference to Kim Il Sung made her realize that the cult of “dear leadership” was no more credible than authoritarianism under the Assads in Syria. Second, during a trip to Beijing in 1989, she befriended South Korean students. They gave her a very different Korean historical narrative. She returned to Pyongyang with illegal books and ROK and American movies.  To help her unravel her family history, which included a Basque maternal grandfather, Monica signed up for Spanish lessons at Pyongyang University in 1992. All of this was eye-opening, and she began to realise that her DPRK identity was artificial, if not fraudulent.

Monica left North Korea for Spain and Equatorial Guinea in 1994. Ten years later, she returned to Pyongyang on a group tour organized by the pro-DPRK Korea Friendship Association (KFA). She was misled by the tour company who, having promised her anonymity, used her as a stoolpigeon for the DPRK regime. Thereafter, work opportunities brought her to New York, Seoul, Shenzhen and Shanghai. Seeking to reconcile her past as the daughter of an African dictator and a ward of Kim Il Sung, she attended SOAS in London in 2019.

These studies revealed for her that there were actually no “good” or “bad” countries in a world of international conflict. After many years of contemplation, Monica decided that she, “a mixed-race woman” of African, Asian, and European culture, could still honour her father and Kim Il Sung. But she realized they had deprived her of truth. This English memoir is substantially a text on which she made “concessions” to the ROK government to pass its censors. We cannot be sure that either version has the veracity one might expect from an autobiography. It may be regarded as deploying auto-fiction to spare her innocent informants. Nevertheless, she offers significant insight on Pyongyang in the last stages of the Cold War.

The past year has seen an unprecedented axis between Russia, China, and the DPRK, with the latter providing enormous manpower for Putin’s operation in the Ukraine. One might suggest that DPRK rhetoric might increasingly be challenged by the casualty-toll endured by North Korean families. However, perhaps the real value of Monica’s account is contained in how little it says about the micro-level realities of North Korean life. Locked in such a dystopian and hermeneutically-sealed security bubble, the DPRK was, and remains, truly capable of withholding essential truth from its own citizens.

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