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

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.

She wants to tell her story now, she says, because she is tired of being silent. Her father and his family have been wronged, she says. She wants the world to know that her father was a great man.

This is not a view shared by everybody. The U.S. State Department describes the regime of Francisco Macias this way: "In July 1970, Macias created a single-party state, and by May 1971, key portions of the constitution were abrogated. In 1972 Macias took complete control of the government and assumed the title President-for-Life. The Macias regime was characterized by abandonment of all government functions except internal security, which was accomplished by terror; this led to the death or exile of up to one-third of the country's population. Due to pilferage, ignorance, and neglect, the country's infrastructure — electrical, water, road, transportation, and health — fell into ruin. Religion was repressed and education ceased."

Empress Bella Syttam Macias is incensed and hurt when she is read these words. These are just lies propagated by her father's successor, Teodoro Obiang, and his friends, she says. "Every single thing you're reading is what the current president is doing," she insists. And, indeed, according to the State Department report, there is still corruption and a dysfunctional judicial system under Obiang, and there was a "severe human rights setback" in 2002. But, overall, according to the State Department, "it should be noted that, out of the anarchic, chaotic, and repressive conditions of the Macias years the country has made small, haphazard steps toward the development of (a) participatory political system."

Lewis Hoffacker, who was a nonresident ambassador to Equatorial Guinea between 1970 and 1972, and Herbert Spiro, ambassador between 1975 and 1976, both say that Francisco Macias was considered a despot. "I wouldn't want to upset this daughter, but the general consensus was that he was like (former Ugandan dictator) Idi Amin and that he killed and terrorized his people," says Hoffacker.

Bella Macias says her father was misunderstood. "He became the enemy of the whole African continent," blamed for trying to bring Western, "white" ways to Equatorial Guinea, she says, when all he wanted, for example, was equality between men and women.