‘My Father Set Our Whole Shack Alight,’ Shares Ntando Duma

Ntando Duma has never opened up about her family until now and the actress revealed some heartbreaking stories from her childhood. Speaking to TshisaLIVE Ntando opened up about her abusive father who passed on in 2008. ‘My father set our whole shack alight,’ shares Ntando Duma.

“My father was an alcoholic and used to drink a lot, he was very abusive. The most tragic thing is me and my siblings would often cry because we were seeing him beating our mother, and he would then beat all of us too,” Ntando recalled.

The actress opened up about the night he set their shack on fire. “We used to live in a shack in Soweto and one day he came home really drunk and instead of knocking and asking for us to let him in, he set the whole shack alight. We were inside. We had to call an ambulance and neighbors to help us. It was so horrible. We were screaming. My mother threw us all out of the window and then she tried to find a way out for herself,” she told the publication.

The actress says because of her father’s abusive behavior, her mother had to send her and her siblings to go live with their grandmother.

“He passed away in 2008, when I was 13. His family came to look for us to help bury him. We had to go. He was never a human being when he was alive. He was never a father. So I was like ‘whatever, let’s just go and bury him’.”