Meghan Markle disclosed that her son Archie nearly escaped a fire in his bedroom, where he was meant to be sleeping, during the Sussexes’ tour of South Africa in 2019.
In the opening episode of her Archetypes podcast on Spotify, the Duchess of Sussex shared the tale with her close friend and tennis legend Serena Williams.
Meghan claimed that Archie’s then-nanny, Lauren, a Zimbabwean who enjoyed tying the infant to her back with a mud cloth, had taken the four-and-a-half-month-old with her downstairs to get a snack when a heater in Archie’s nursery caught fire.
“In that amount of time that she went downstairs, the heater in the nursery caught on fire,” she said.
“There was no smoke detector. Someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway, went in, fire extinguisher. He was supposed to be sleeping in there.”
The former Suits alum described how they dropped Archie off at the housing complex they were staying in right away after coming on their official tour so he could get some rest.
While this was going on, Meghan and the Duke of Sussex travelled to Cape Town’s Nyanga township, where the duchess gave a speech.
She added: “There was this moment where I’m standing on a tree stump and I’m giving this speech to women and girls, and we finish the engagement, we get in the car and they say there’s been a fire at the residence. What? There’s been a fire in the baby’s room.
“We came back. And, of course, as a mother, you go, ‘oh, my God, what?’ Everyone’s in tears, everyone’s shaken.
“And what do we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement? I said, ‘this doesn’t make any sense.”
The duchess described how she wanted to tell people what had happened and stressed the need for more understanding of the “human moments behind the scenes”.
“I was like, ‘can you just tell people what happened?’ And so much, I think, optically, the focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels,” she said.
As per ITV, later that day, the couple had visited Cape Town’s historic District Six neighbourhood, met residents in its Homecoming Centre and heard from people who were forcibly removed to a township during the Apartheid era, with the Sussexes also carrying out an impromptu walkabout.
Just months before they stepped down from their positions as senior working royals, Meghan and Harry undertook a controversial tour of Africa in the autumn of 2019.
Entitled The Misconception of Ambition with Serena Williams, Meghan talks with Williams about the double standards women face when they are labelled “ambitious”.
Williams also says Harry talked with her for around an hour about her decision to stop playing tennis before it was officially publicised.
Meghan, who stepped away from the monarchy with the Queen’s grandson for a new life in California, says to Williams: “I think, you know, I think both of us, or the three of us, really know that sometimes the right decision isn’t the easiest decision.”
Meghan’s next Archetypes podcast, which is part of the Sussex multimillion-pound deal with Spotify, will feature singer, Mariah Carey.
