African empress in S.L. suburbia aims to set dad's record straight

This is how Bella Macias makes her entrance: Her daughter Fina answers the door, then Fina brings a straight-backed chair into the living room and then ushers in her mother, as if introducing royalty.

Oh yes, Macias says, despite everything she definitely feels like an empress. "Empress Bella Syttam Macias" is the name she prefers, although both "Syttam" and "Bella" are nicknames, as is "Empress" for that matter, the name her father called her when she was little. She smiles when she says the name, with just a hint of defiance.

She was a young girl when her father was elected president of Equatorial Guinea. She was a teenager when he was executed in front of her. That was after soldiers set fire to her family's house, disfiguring her baby and killing her mother, but before her twin sister was shot, her husband was imprisoned, her family was put under house arrest and she was tortured. Eventually she escaped her country, taking flight in the middle of a tropical night. She was forced to leave behind nine of her children — one more unthinkable detail in a story she has kept mostly to herself since moving to Utah a decade ago.

Now Macias lives in the Salt Lake Valley, in the kind of stuccoed subdivision where it's easy to imagine that nothing out of the ordinary has ever happened.

On the wall in her living room hang four large photos, two of her mother and two of her father. It's a small living room, so the photos are a definite presence, much larger than the triptych of three other heroes: Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Her father, Francisco Macias Nguema Biyogo, was elected Equatorial Guinea's first president in 1968, the same year the small central African country gained independence from Spain. In 1979 he was overthrown in a coup.

On the African continent, Macias says, when a powerful man is overthrown, that man's family members are in danger for the rest of their lives. If she returned to Equatorial Guinea now, 28 years after the coup, there would be orders to capture her, she says. "It's like every member of that family is assigned to die." Even now, Macias is worried that her father's enemies might track her down in Utah.

But in her south valley neighborhood, with its uneventful stillness on a cold afternoon, she also feels almost peaceful. Peaceful and maybe a little bored. An empress who woke up one morning and found herself in the suburbs.

If by African royalty you are expecting a headdress and a wide-sleeved tunic, though, that is not Bella Macias, who looks more like a flamenco dancer perhaps — exotic and stylish, a woman who loves short skirts and high heels, a woman who owns many pairs of fancy eyeglasses. Macias understands some English but mostly speaks Spanish, the official language of Equatorial Guinea, and relies on her children to translate.

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