The Duchess of Sussex has shared the trauma of how son Archie narrowly escaped a fire in his bedroom during a royal tour to South Africa.

Meghan Markle recounted the experience on her Archetypes podcast, which was released on Spotify on Tuesday, in a conversation with tennis great Serena Williams.

The duchess spoke of her distress after learning of the near-miss soon after delivering a speech to girls in the Nyanga township in Cape Town. She said how she rushed back to see Archie, then just four months old, and then having to leave him to carry out another official engagement.

“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’,” she said.

“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 Sussexes had dropped their young son off at the housing unit they were staying in for a sleep, straight after flying in for their official tour in 2019. Meghan and husband Prince Harry then left to kickstart their royal visit with their first engagement.

Archie’s nanny, whose name Meghan gives only as Lauren – a Zimbabwean who liked to tie the baby on her back with a mud cloth – had taken him downstairs with her while she went to get a snack, just as the heater in the nursery caught fire.

“In that amount of time that she went downstairs, the heater in the nursery caught on fire,” Meghan said.

“There was no smoke detector. Someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway … He was supposed to be sleeping in there.”

The duchess described how she wanted to tell people what had happened.

“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.

She stressed the need for more understanding of the “human moments behind the scenes”.

“We had to leave our baby,” she said.

“Even though we were being moved into another place afterwards, we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement.”

Williams replied, “I couldn’t have done that”.

Meghan and Harry’s African tour took place in the autumn of 2019, just months before they quit as senior working royals.

During the trip, the US-born former actor filmed an interview with ITV in which she told of her struggles with royal life, and how she had tried to cope with the pressures by putting on a “stiff upper lip”.

In the podcast, which discussed the double standards women face when they are labelled “ambitious”, Meghan said: “I don’t remember ever personally feeling the negative connotation behind the word ambitious until I started dating my now husband”.

Williams reveals Harry helped her with her decision to retire from tennis long before it was announced. She says the prince spent about an hour discussing the issue with her.

Meghan, who stepped away from the monarchy with the Queen’s grandson for a new life in California, says to Williams: “It takes a lot of courage to stop something … than to keep going sometimes”.

-AAP