The African president’s daughter raised in North Korea by Kim Il Sung
By Sheriff Bojang Jnr
Macias was left behind when her father was executed and her mother disappeared.
But decades later, she’s reclaiming her story. And his.
After months of scheduling misfires and clashing calendars, I finally manage to sit down with Monica Macias at a casual sandwich chain along Victoria Street in Westminster, London. She greets me with a quiet ease, carrying the kind of composure that comes from having lived several lives in one.
We settle by the window, drinking coffee (me) and coke (her), watching the cranes swing and commuters blur past, a fitting backdrop for a conversation shaped by exile, reinvention, and uneasy belonging.
Kim Il Sung kept his promise to take care of them, in a society that the rest of the world sees as secretive, authoritarian and isolated.
Macias’s formative years unfolded at the Mangyongdae Revolutionary School, an elite institution where she mingled with older children, learned Korean fluently, and took part in weapons training drills.
Absence of a mother
But that upbringing came at a cost.
Macias’s mother, who had also been in Pyongyang for gallstone surgery, left North Korea shortly after her father’s execution and never returned.
The abandonment left a deep scar. “My schoolmates would get visits from their mothers,” she says. “I didn’t have mine aroundShe remained in Pyongyang until 1994 – the year Kim Il Sung died – before setting off for Spain, the birthplace of her maternal grandfather.
There, she began an agonising process of self-discovery, tracing her father’s history, trying to piece together the fractured puzzle of her past and confronting the narratives that had long painted him as a tyrant.-The Africa Report