“Black Girl from Pyongyang” is the memoir of a woman who, having suffered cultural and political shocks in her early years, left North Korea in search of her identity and a way to reconcile her West African background with the Kim regime.  

Monica Macias spent over a decade under the care of Kim Il Sung after her father and dictator of Equatorial Guinea, Francisco Macias, sent her and her siblings to the North Korean capital in 1979 shortly before his overthrow. The three children entered Mangyongdae Revolutionary School, an elite institution originally established for the orphaned children of those who had died serving the DPRK.