Meghan, Duchess of Sussex is ‘43% Nigerian’. Picture: Paul Edwards/Pool via Reuters.
MEGHAN, Duchess of Sussex is “43% Nigerian”.
The 41-year-old duchess looked into her family history “a couple of years ago” and Meghan discovered that she has strong links to the West African country.
Speaking to Nigerian-American star Ziwe on her “Archetypes” podcast, Meghan said: “I just had my genealogy done a couple of years ago, I’m 43% Nigerian.”
Ziwe asked Meghan if she knew anything more specific about her background.
Ziwe said: “Are you serious? This is huge. Igbo, Yoruba, do we know?”
The duchess, who has Archie, 3, and Lilibet, 16 months, with Prince Harry, said: “I’m going to start to dig deeper into all of this because anyone that I’ve told, especially Nigerian women, are just like, ‘What?’”
Meanwhile, Meghan has revealed that the she only “started to understand what it was like to be treated like a black woman” when she began dating Harry.
The duchess made the confession during a podcast with music star Mariah Carey, who is also of mixed race.
She said: “I had read this article about Halle Berry, and they were asking her how she felt being treated as a mixed-race woman in the world. And her response was her saying, ‘Well, your experience through the world is how people view you.’ So she said because she was darker in colour, she was being treated as a black woman, not as a mixed woman.
“And I think for us, it’s very different because we’re light-skinned. You’re not treated as a black woman. You're not treated as a white woman. You sort of fit in between.
“I mean, if there’s any time in my life that it’s been more focused on my race, it’s only once I started dating my husband. Then I started to understand what it was like to be treated like a black woman. Because up until then, I had been treated like a mixed woman. And things really shifted.”