Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s tour of Nigeria was compared to Edward VIII visiting Nazi Germany by a royal author who subsequently deleted the post “because it had caused unanticipated offence.”
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arrived in Nigeria’s capital city Abuja on Friday and were pictured at a spread of engagements over the weekend.
The official purpose of the trip was to celebrate Nigeria joining the Invictus Games, Harry’s tournament for wounded soldiers, though the unofficial backdrop was Meghan’s discovery in 2022 that she is 43 percent Nigerian.
However, not all responses to the royal tour-style visit were positive back in Britain, sparking a debate about the tone of the criticism.
One commentator who deleted a post was Christopher Wilson, author of A Greater Love: Charles And Camilla.
He wrote in a post on X: “Desperate to show his wife they were still ‘royal’ in the eyes of the world, the Duke of Windsor took Wallis on a tour of Germany in 1937. They were greeted ecstatically. Nigeria’s human rights record is not far short of Nazi Germany’s.”
Edward VIII was Queen Elizabeth II’s uncle who abdicated the throne in 1936 in order to marry his American wife Wallis Simpson.
Wilson was not the only U.K. commentator called out for his response to the Nigeria tour. In fact, Endgame author Omid Scobie wrote, “I see the clowns are out in full force again,” as he posted Wilson’s Tweet alongside another by Talk TV presenter Kevin O’Sullivan.
O’Sullivan had written: “Great weird pretend royal tour of dodgy Nigeria by Harry & Meghan. Where next? Somalia?”
And there was a debate on GB News show, The Saturday Five, in which panelist Darren Grimes said: “She’s made her entire identity—to score some points on the old diversity check list—now about Nigeria. She thanked them for welcoming her home.
“Now some genealogists actually suggest she may be Ghanaian and the Sussex-loving press are lapping it up. I think it’s extraordinary.”
But Albie Amankona, another panelist on the show, said: “I don’t think it’s extraordinary at all.
“You don’t understand African American culture in that sense because it’s a really big thing for Black people in the New World, so people who would have gone to America and the Caribbean as slaves initially and who are now descended from slaves, to find out what their ancestry is and then go back to that place and feel that they are from somewhere.”
“I’m of African descent, that is not my experience, it’s completely different. But I think for you to say it’s outrageous that Meghan’s gone to Nigeria and said she’s gone home that is something that a lot of African Americans do and a lot of Black Caribbean do and would you seriously say to them it’s stupid for them to go to Africa and feel like they’re at home?”
Grimes replied: “Yes, I would say that.”
See the deleted tweet and the retraction:
