Meghan Markle Reveals She Had to Continue Africa Tour Despite a Fire Breaking Out in Archie's Room

Meghan Markle is opening up about a terrifying experience during her royal tour of Africa.

On the debut episode of her podcast Archetypes released Tuesday, the Duchess of Sussex sat down with longtime friend and tennis champion Serena Williams for a personal talk about ambition. While speaking about their roles as mothers, Meghan revealed that during her visit to Africa with Prince Harry in 2019, a fire broke out in the nursery where their son, Archie Harrison, was staying.

"When we went on our tour to South Africa, we landed with Archie," Meghan, 41, began. "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."

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"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 said they raced back to the residence and their "amazing nanny" Lauren was "in floods of tears."

"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. There was no smoke detector. Someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway, went in, fire extinguished," Meghan said.

She added, "He was supposed to be sleeping in there."

Meghan said everyone was "in tears" and "shaken" by the incident, but they had to leave for another scheduled 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," she said. "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."

She continued, "And even though we were being moved to another place afterwards, we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement."

Serena replied, "I couldn't have done that. I would have said, 'Uh-uh.' "

Meghan then said on the podcast in a voiceover, "These human moments behind the scenes, the ones under the surface… they're everything. Because when we don't swim in the shallow end, and instead choose to dive into the deep end, that's when we gain a more nuanced understanding of each other."

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During the visit to South Africa, Meghan spoke about the impact that negative tabloid coverage had taken on her for the documentary Harry & Meghan: An African Journey.

"Any woman, especially when they're pregnant, you're really vulnerable, and so that was made really challenging. And then when you have a newborn, you know. And especially as a woman, it's a lot," she said. "So, you add this on top of just trying to be a new mom or trying to be a newlywed. It's um…yeah. I guess, also thank you for asking because not many people have asked if I'm okay, but it's a very real thing to be going through behind the scenes."

Archie, now 3, joined his parents for his first official engagement to meet with famed anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter, Thandeka Tutu-Gxashe.