The year was 1979 and Equatorial Guinea had been in a disarray for the past two years as poor living standards and economic recession wreaked havoc on the country. In the middle of it all, Monica Macias’ father and first president of the nation, Francisco Macias,  sent her and two of her siblings, Fran and Maribel, to live in North Korea.

At seven years old, Monica was unaware of the coup d’etat on her father. While her oldest brother Teo was sent to Cuba, Monica and her siblings went into the care of Kim Il Sung, the president of North Korea and grandfather of Kim Jong Un. He became her guardian until he passed away in 1994.

“I later learned that Kim Il Sung knew about the coup d’état in Equatorial Guinea when it happened,” Monica writes in her memoir, Black Girl from Pyongyang. “He waited until my mother had recovered from her operation to tell her the sad news about my father and Teo’s [her oldest sibling] return to Equatorial Guinea.”