Britain’s Prince Harry met Angola’s presidential couple, Joao and Ana Dias Lourenco, yesterday before heading off to Malawi on the sixth day of his visit to Southern Africa.
Harry, dressed more formally than usual in a light grey suit, met the couple at the presidential palace before visiting the Lucrecia Paim maternity hospital, where Angola’s first lady has spearheaded a project focused on preventing mothers from transmitting HIV to their babies.
Rates of mother-to-baby transmission are the highest in sub-Saharan Africa and, despite Angola’s low infection rate, factors such as high fertility and a young population, combined with a lack of awareness, are starting to drive up the number of infections, royal communications said.
His time in Angola has been an opportunity for the prince to take up the cause of his late mother Princess Diana, who 22 years ago visited the country to highlight the dangers of landmines – a remnant of the 25 years of civil strife there.
Harry visited the northern city of Huambo, where an iconic picture was taken of Princess Diana in 1997 as she walked through a minefield.
“It has been emotional retracing my mother’s steps,” said Prince Harry of Diana, who died in a car crash in Paris a few months after her visit to Angola.
Harry travels to Malawi for the next leg of his tour, where he will visit educational, environmental and health projects in his first trip to that country in an official capacity.
The trip includes honouring a British soldier, Mathew Talbot, who was killed in May while on an anti-poaching patrol in Liwonde National Park.
Harry will depart Malawi tomorrow for Johannesburg to join his wife, Meghan Markle, and their four-month-old son Archie, who remained in South Africa to attend other events.
Meghan was shown tying a ribbon she had signed at the site where a 19-year-old was murdered in Cape Town last month, in a photo posted on the couple’s official Instagram account.
The rape and murder of Uyinene Mrwetyana sparked a number of protests in the country, resulting in President Cyril Ramaphosa cancelling his trip to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
Harry with staff and patients at the Princess Diana Orthopaedic Centre in Huambo, Angola, on Friday.
