Meghan Markle reveals fire broke out in baby Archie's room during South Africa trip

Meghan Markle has spoken about how a fire broke out in baby Archie’s room during a tour of South Africa.

In the first episode of her new podcast, she revealed that the incident took place during the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s trip to the country in 2019.

Speaking on Archetypes, Meghan said they had been in South Africa for a matter of hours before they had to attend an official engagement at a nearby township.

It was during this visit that Archie – just months old at the time – was left with their nanny at their residence.

Meghan explained that she was told of a fire having broken out in Archie’s room while she was at the engagement.

However, their nanny had taken Archie out of the room earlier, despite the intention for him to have been put to bed.

“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 us staying in,” Meghan said on the podcast.

“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, there’s been a fire in the baby’s room’.

“And so, we’re in the car… we had just landed an hour, two hours before… racing back, we get back, our amazing nanny Lauren who we’d had all the way in Canada here, Lauren [is 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 and get a snack downstairs’… Lauren is from Zimbabwe and we would love that she would always tie him on her back with a mud cloth.

“And her instinct was, ‘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 that following the incident, people were in tears and shaken.

“He was supposed to be sleeping in there. And we came back, and of course as a mother, you go, ‘oh my God, what if’,” recalled Meghan.

“Everyone’s in tears, everyone’s shaken and what did we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement.

“I said, ‘this doesn’t make any sense, can you just tell people what happened?'”.