Britain’s Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, attends a ceremonial welcome before his meeting with Angola’s President Joao Lourenco at the Presidential Palace in Luanda, Angola, September 28, 2019. Dominic Lipinski/Pool via REUTERS
September 29, 2019
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – Britain’s Prince Harry is due to arrive in Malawi on Sunday, the final stop of the solo leg of his southern Africa tour before rejoining his family in South Africa, where wife Meghan held a meeting on Saturday with female activists.
The Duke of Sussex left the duchess and his four-month-old son Archie – who stole the spotlight when he sat on his mother’s lap while his parents chatted with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu in Cape Town – to visit Botswana, Angola and Malawi.
While Harry has visited Malawi several times privately, this trip will mark his first visit in an official capacity.
On arrival in the capital Lilongwe on Sunday, he will visit a college and interact with young women whose education is supported by funds from Britain.
After that, he will meet President Peter Mutharika, who he knows after meeting on a number of occasions beforehand, and later attend a reception hosted by the British High Commissioner.
Harry, Queen Elizabeth’s grandson and sixth in line to the throne, has been visiting southern Africa for two decades for holidays and conservation work. This trip is part of an overseas tour with Meghan and Archie – their first as a family.
The family drew crowds of well-wishers in Cape Town, where Meghan – who has advocated for women’s rights – visited a post office where a female student was murdered last month, one of a spate of killings and rapes that have sparked outrage over high levels of gender-based violence in the country.
On Sunday, it was announced that a day earlier Meghan had met with a group of female leaders and activists including Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, who in 1956 at age 18 led 20,000 women in an anti-apartheid march on the Union Buildings, the seat of government, in Pretoria. She is the last living leader of the march.
“I was recently reminded that the first one up the mountain often gets knocked down the hardest, but makes way for everyone behind them,” the statement quoted Meghan as saying to the women, adding that all young female campaigners must keep at it.
Gender-based violence, she said, was a global problem and the solution had to come from everybody, regardless of factors like race, gender or politics.
On Monday, Harry will fly to Liwonde National Park in Malawi, where he will join an anti-poaching patrol with local park rangers and witness an anti-poaching demonstration conducted jointly by local rangers and the UK military.
He will then on Tuesday visit a health centre, pharmacy and youth reproductive health outreach programme, before rejoining his family in South Africa for another township visit, this time in Johannesburg.
(Reporting by Emma Rumney; editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
