Monica Macais Nguema, is the daughter of Francois Nguema, the first president of Equatorial Guinea.
Monica usually regards herself as the daughter of dictators.
President Nguema who was already facing trouble at home, sent his family to North Korea and placed them under the custody of his friend Kim Il-sung the founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
The family set a record of being the only Blacks in North Korea.
On their arrival, Kim gave them a chauffeured Volvo to ease their movement and gave every child an Omega wristwatch.
Unfortunately, four months after their arrival, their father, who had committed many atrocities, was executed by his nephew Obiang Nguema Mbasogo (the current president of Equatorial Guinea).
Soon, their mother abandoned them in North Korea and eventually settled in Spain.
Despite all these, Kim still looked after Nguema’s children and enrolled them in Mangyongdae Revolutionary School in Pyongyang, reserved for the children of senior government loyalists.
There, they were taught to fire Kalashnikov rifles and learned the dangers of the West and South Korea.
“Kim Il-sung sent us holiday gifts and year-end theatre tickets, and we used to watch the performance a few rows behind him,” Monica recalled.
“We didn’t lack anything, although our movements and contacts with ordinary North Koreans were quite limited.”
However, she missed her mother and always cried at night in her bed.
She later joined Pyongyang University of Light Industry.
It was there that Monica became exposed to the realities of the world when she started interacting with students from other countries.
She recalled how one day she told off a Syrian student for seating on a newspaper with a photo of Kim Il-sung, which was considered a big sin in North Korea.
But the Syrian student responded to her: “That’s because you’ve only lived in Pyongyang North Korea!”
Monica became even more curious about the outside world when she travelled to Beijing to visit her cousin, who had been posted there as Equatorial Guinea’s ambassador.
Because of the indoctrination they had received about the evil of the West, she hurriedly left a Beijing shop when she met an American inside.
When she returned to Pyongyang after her holiday, she couldn’t just understand how people in China were free while in North Korea all she could see in the morning were billboards stating: “The party decides, we follow!”
Because of this, at the end of her university education, she decided to leave North Korea, a country she had called home ever since she was a small child.
Before her departure in 1994, Kim Il-sung gave gifts, which included a plane ticket to Madrid where her mother and the rest of her family lived, and enough money to last her for six months.
She lived in Spain for 10 years, visited Equatorial Guinea, and worked in New York, USA.
However, despite all the luxury and freedom of living in the West, she still missed North Korea, which she considered home, after-all she had spent her childhood and part of her adulthood there.
The only problem was that the North Korean society was becoming too rigid and manipulated by the state.
Eventually, Monica decided to relocate to South Korea, which has some freedom unlike the neighbouring North Korea.
She currently divides her time between South Korea and Equatorial Guinea country of her father, with brief visits to Spain where her brothers and mother live.