Prince Harry walked through a minefield in Angola Wednesday, in a clear evocation of his mother and her ground-breaking work in the field.
The similarity of the images 28 years apart was nonetheless striking.
Meghan did not join him on the trip with sources telling the Daily Beast she was looking after their children at home.
Parts of Angola remain some of the most heavily mined regions of the world. 80 Angolans have been killed by mines in the last five years alone.
The deadly munitions are a remnant of the 1975-2022 Angolan Civil War. The Halo Trust, of which Harry is patron, has cleared over 120,000 landmines and 100,000 bombs from Angola, but some 1,000 minefields remain to be cleared across the country.
Harry visited a school and said in a statement released by Halo, “Children should never have to live in fear of playing outside or walking to school. Here in Angola, over three decades later, the remnants of war still threaten lives every day.”
Of course, this being Harry, his critics were swift to criticize images of the visit released on social media as performative PR.
The criticism was arguably intensified by a decision Harry made to ban the U.K. media, thereby antagonizing them, from attending his engagements in Angola.
The fallout demonstrated the difficulty that Harry now has in avoiding his and Meghan’s toxic feud with his family—which they have publicized in great detail in books, films and interviews—from derailing even the most altruistic initiatives that they undertake.
The Daily Mail, for example, claimed that the exercise was aimed squarely at rebranding him as something other than a “bitter prince,” and the report also claimed that Harry decided not to bring Meghan because he didn’t want to be overshadowed by her.
Sources close to Harry told the Daily Beast this was “categorically untrue” and that it was “entirely normal” for the couple to do separate engagements. They added that Meghan was looking after her children at home.
