Shortly after Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, the first child of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle was born, the formerly-royal couple took him on their trip to Africa.
The trip was highly publicized for many reasons. Mostly, so that the world can get their first look at the newest royal baby.
Meghan Markle Reveals Scary Incident That Involved Archie Being Saved From a Fire While in Africa
And from what the public knew at the time of the trip, it seemed like everything went swimmingly. But now we know that wasn’t exactly the case.
In her inaugural podcast episode for her new series, Archetypes, Meghan Markle revealed one particularly scary event that took place during their trip to Africa. And how their team responded to the event.
“When we went on our tour to South Africa, we landed with Archie,” Meghan’s explained to her first guest, Serena Williams. “Archie was what, four and a half months old. And the moment we landed, we had to drop him off at this housing unit that they had had us staying in.”
“He was going to get ready to go down for his nap. We immediately went to an official engagement in this township called Nyanga, and 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.’ What?”
Meghan explained that when they got back to the residence they were staying at, they were met by their “amazing nanny” who was in tears over the situation. Thankfully, their nanny’s instincts saved Archie from harm’s way.
“She was supposed to put Archie down for his nap, and she just said, ‘You know what? Let me just go get a snack downstairs.’ And she was from Zimbabwe, and we loved that she would always tie him on her, her back with a mud cloth, and her instinct was like, ‘Let me just bring him with me before I put him down.’ In that amount of time that she went downstairs, the heater in the nursery caught on fire,” Meghan explained.
“There was no smoke detector. Someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway, went in, fire extinguished. [Archie] was supposed to be sleeping in there.”
Despite the ordeal, Meghan and Harry were on a tight schedule. And their team was firm in making sure everything looked like it was running smoothly.
“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,” Meghan ultimately admitted while talking with Williams.
“And part of the humanizing and the breaking through of these labels and these archetypes and these boxes that we’re put into is having some understanding on the human moments behind the scenes that people might not have any awareness of and to give each other a break. Because we did — we had to leave our baby.”
Williams admitted that she wouldn’t have been able to leave after something like that happened. I couldn’t have done that. I would have said, ‘Uh-uh.'”
Talk about scary!