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Meghan Markle opened up on her new Spotify podcast Archetypes about a scary incident that occurred during her and Prince Harry’s 2019 royal tour of Southern Africa. During the first episode, which was released on Aug. 23, the Duchess of Sussex revealed to her guest and friend Serena Williams that a fire broke out in the nursery where her son Archie Harrison was supposed to be sleeping.
“When we went on our tour to South Africa, we landed with Archie. 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,” Meghan recalled. “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?”
The couple raced back to the housing unit, where their “amazing nanny, Lauren” was in “floods of tears.” Meghan said, “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.’ Lauren’s from Zimbabwe and we loved that she would always tie him on 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.”
“There was no smoke detector. Someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway went in, fire extinguished. He was supposed to be sleeping in there,” the Duchess continued. “And we came back. And of course, as a mother, you go, ‘Oh, my God, what?’”
While everyone was “in tears” and “shaken,” Meghan told Serena that they had to “go out and do another official engagement.” “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. 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,” the Duchess of Sussex said. “And even though we were being moved to another place afterwards, we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement.”
Meghan’s podcast launched on Tuesday, Aug. 23. Archetypes, which is the first podcast series as part of Spotify and Archewell Audio’s multi-year partnership, is “about the labels and tropes that try to hold women back.” “Over the course of the next dozen episodes, we’re going to live inside and rip apart the boxes women have been placed into for generations – boxes like diva, crazy, the b-word, slut,” Meghan said on the first episode. “Some of these words – these labels – are harsh; they’re abrasive. And I want to get to the bottom of where they come from, why they’ve stuck around for so long, and – importantly – how we can move past them.”