Courtesy of either discreet or social media-shunning Air Botswana crew members, it took the world much longer for the world to learn about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s secret romance. After convincing Meghan to visit Botswana with him, Prince Harry had them fly separately. “We couldn’t risk being seen together, the press finding out about us.
Not yet,” Harry writes in Spare, his memoir that was officially published last Tuesday. The result was that Meghan flew from London to Johannesburg, then to Maun, where she was met by a friend of Harry’s called Teej. “I wanted to do it myself, of course, but couldn’t without creating a scene,” Harry says in the book. Instead, he met her at Teej’s house where he asked her about the flight from Johannesburg to Maun. “She laughed about the Air Botswana crew,” Harry writes of Meghan’s response.
“They were big fans of Suits, so they’d asked her to pose for a photo.” Meghan is an actress and at the time was a cast member of an American legal drama television series called Suits. It is set at a fictional New York City law firm. The series featured Meghan as Rachel Zane, an ambitious paralegal. She left the show in 2018 after marrying Harry and thus becoming a member of a family that lives an uncommonly regimented life. Botswana viewers get Suits through Dstv, a Sub-Saharan African direct broadcast satellite service owned by MultiChoice that is based in Randburg, South Africa and Netflix. Harry’s own response to the news about Meghan’s encounter with the Air Botswana crew was as follows: “Yay, I said, thinking: Shit. If one member of the crew posted that photo, the cat would be out of the bag.”
The cat stayed in the bag, in one respect because the couple wore disguises when out in public. Suits is shot in Toronto and visiting Meghan in the Canadian city, Harry reminded himself that “Toronto wasn’t London, but it also wasn’t Botswana.” He makes that statement in the sense of London being infested with paparazzi. The cat (almost) bolted out of the bag as Harry left Toronto for London. When he landed at Heathrow Airport, “it was all unconfirmed, and there were no photos, so there was nothing to fuel it.” Or so he thought because that was “calm before the shit storm.” He writes in the book: “I’d been braced for the usual madness, the standard libels, but I hadn’t anticipated this level of unrestrained lying. Above all, I hadn’t been ready for the racism. Both the dog-whistle racism and the glaring, vulgar, in-your-face racism.
The Daily Mail took the lead. Its headline: Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton. Subhead: Gang-scarred home of her mother revealed—so will he be dropping in for tea? Another tabloid jumped into the fray with this jaw-dropper: Harry to marry into gangster royalty?” “Straight Outta Compton” was forced cultural reference to the title of the debut studio album by a gangsta rap group called N.W.A (Niggers With Attitude) which was released in 1987 by a label called Ruthless Records. The album had a track, “Fuck tha Police”, which drew the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. N.W.A members were from a crime-riddled Los Angeles county called Compton – which Meghan (or her black mother) had absolutely no connection with.
Harry writes in Spare: “As if its headline wasn’t disgraceful enough, the Mail went on to say that Compton had been the scene of forty-seven crimes in the last week alone. Forty-seven, imagine that. Never mind that Meg had never lived in Compton, never even lived near it. She’d lived half an hour away, as far from Compton as Buckingham Palace was from Windsor Castle. But forget that: Even if she had lived in Compton, years ago or currently, so what? Who cared how many crimes were committed in Compton, or anywhere else, so long as Meg wasn’t the one committing them? A day or two later the Mail weighed in again, this time with an essay by the sister of London’s former mayor Boris Johnson, predicting that Meg would…do something…genetically…to the Royal Family. “If there is issue from her alleged union with Prince Harry, the Windsors will thicken their watery, thin blue blood and Spencer pale skin and ginger hair with some rich and exotic DNA.”
At this point, the cat was well and truly out of the bag. It would have done so months and much earlier had one member of the Air Botswana crew posted a photo of Meghan aboard the Johannesburg-to-Maun flight.
