Meghan Markle should leave those poor Nigerians alone

The Sussexes have travelled to Africa in search of victim points.

Photo by David Rotimi on Unsplash

Meghan Markle returned home last week. Not to her children and chickens in Montecito but to Nigeria - a country she has never lived in - indeed, never before visited - and where she has no known living relatives. Accompanied by Prince Harry, on a royal tour in all but name, Meghan thanked Nigerians for ‘welcoming me home’.

It turns out that several years ago, the Duchess of Sussex took a genealogy test. After spitting into a test tube or rubbing a swab around the inside of her mouth, she received a breakdown of her ancestry showing she was 43 per cent Nigerian. For most people, this would be the basis of a fun anecdote. As Scientific American notes: 

to say that you are 20 percent Irish, 4 percent Native American or 12 percent Scandinavian is fun, trivial and has very little scientific meaning. We all have thousands of ancestors, and our family trees become matted webs as we go back in time, which means that before long, our ancestors become everyone’s ancestors. 

In other words, go back far enough and we’ll discover that I’m as Nigerian as Meghan. 

It’s not hard to see what attracts Meghan and Harry to Nigeria. On this latest trip, the couple were treated like royalty with red carpets, posh receptions and waving crowds. The plebs back home might roll their eyes at Meghan’s overpriced jam but in Nigeria, she was honored with royal titles. She is a princess, no matter what her critics say! But Nigeria offers Meghan something even more attractive than pretending to be a princess - and that’s the opportunity to play the victim. 

By claiming Nigerian heritage, Meghan reminds the world that she is black. ‘Being African American, part of it is not knowing so much about your lineage or background, where you come from specifically’ she declared. What Meghan’s driving at here is the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade which uprooted millions of African men, women and children and made it impossible for those captured to maintain contact with their homeland or relatives. Of course, linking Montecito’s lifestyle queen to the barbaric history of slavery neatly overlooks her present privilege and fabulous wealth. Lucky Megs benefitted not just from marriage but also, presumably, from her parents going to great lengths to make sure their daughter could follow her ambitions. But now, even Harry is referring to people in Nigeria as his ‘in laws’. What a slap in the face.

The whole Nigerian-not-a-royal-tour is the same hilarious but toe-curling cringe we have come to expect from the Sussexes. But their latest escapade is worth reflecting upon for what it tells us about the current moment. It shows us that identity is not seen as something grounded in the reality of our existence and shaped through our daily endeavours but something we uncover by spitting into a test tube. This is not a self we create but a self we get sent to us via a lab report. ‘Family’ is similarly redefined. It is not people we are related to, who we build relationships with through rough and smooth over the course of our lives, but complete strangers we meet one day and will likely never see again. 

Harry and Meghan’s Nigerian adventure also speaks to the cultural validation of victimhood. Meghan does not want to be a Nigerian in Nigeria, where she could no doubt lead a nice if quiet life. Instead, Meghan wants to be a Nigerian in California. Her relationship is not with the reality of Nigeria today but with an imagined past involving fictitious ancestors who were not slave owners but slaves. She wants the world to know she may be a princess but she is also a victim.

We need to ask what Nigeria gains from the pseudo-royal fanfare. Harry and Meghan announced that their Archewell Foundation would help fund school supplies and menstrual products but with the organisation recently labelled ‘delinquent’ by the US charity regulator after a tax cheque got ‘lost in the post’, there are surely questions as to whether these donations will ever materialise. More importantly, Nigeria was able to show itself to be a safe and welcoming country, despite the UK’s Foreign Office labelling large parts of the country as unsafe for travellers.

But there’s a downside too. Meghan and Harry brought along their mental health crusade, complete with American therapy-speak. ‘If you see your friend in your class not smiling, what are you gonna do? You gonna check in with them? Are you gonna ask him if they’re okay?’ Harry asked a captive audience of school children, before reminding them, ‘It’s ok not to be ok’. ‘You see why I married him?’ swooned Megs, ‘He’s so smart!’ - although clearly not when it comes to the basics of English grammar. Yet as we see across the western world, constantly asking children about their emotional states creates the very problems mental health advocates claim to want to prevent. As Abigail Shrier points out in her excellent book Bad Therapy, getting children to ‘play shrink’ and routinely ask each other how they are feeling, pushes them to focus their attention inwards rather than out into the world. It is ‘already making young people sicker, sadder, and more afraid to grow up,’ Shrier writes. So not ‘so smart’, Harry, ‘so dumb’.

The last thing Nigeria needs is a victim-princess and her royal husband introducing the nation’s children to cod psychology. The country’s leaders need to shut the door on Meghan and Harry before it’s too late. 

An edited version of this article was originally published at Spiked: https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/14/meghan-markle-should-leave-those-poor-nigerians-alone/