Dumisani Dlamini is in the headline again after congratulating Doja Cat for her Grammys win | Picture: Instagram
Actor Dumisani Dlamini – now popularly known as “Doja Cat’s dad” – has deleted a post he put up thanking fans for supporting his daughter after she recently won a Grammy award.
“Just wanted to thank everyone who supported my child Zandile. God bless you all,” he posted along with a picture of the musician holding her Grammy award.
A screenshot of his post made its way to Twitter alerting everyone to the post and they descended upon his comments calling him all sorts of names.
This is because Doja Cat (real name Zandile Amala Dlamini) once revealed in an interview that she had never met her father.
Speaking to DJ Quicksilva on his radio show, in 2019, she spoke about her non-existent relationship with Dumisani who left the United States before she was born.
Around the five-minute mark, she tells DJ Quicksilva and his co-host how Dumisani often comments on her Instagram posts even though they have never met.
“He’s an incredible dancer and a great actor but yeah, I don’t know him very well.”
“I guess, when I was like thirteen, I wanted to see him and then I don’t know what happened…”
She told her interviewers that she would still be open to meeting him at this point.
Some years later, she shared an exchange with talk show host and actress Whoopi Goldberg about her father whom Whoopi worked with when she starred in the Sarafina movie decades ago.
“Yeah isn’t that crazy. And I didn’t get to meet him but you did,” Doja told Whoopi.
In a past interview with TshisaLive, Dumisani beamed about his daughter and explained why he was not around to watch her grow up.
He told the publication that after the Sarafina! tour wrapped up in the United States, he decided to stay in the country and during that time, he ended up falling in love with a Jewish-American woman named Deborah Elizabeth Sawyer.
ALSO READ: Twitter reacts to Dumisani Dlamini interview about his ‘estranged’ daughter
The newlyweds later started a family and had two kids together, a son and a daughter who grew up to become one of the most popular musicians of modern times.
“Beautiful girl (who goes by) the name Doja Cat, she’s singing with Nicki Minaj. If you google you will see, it’s D. O. J. A. C. A. T, she’s one of the best singers now in America. That’s my daughter,” Dumisani told TshisaLive.
He also explained that after 15 years of living in the U.S. he became extremely home sick and decided to move back home with the intention of bringing his family over at some stage. However, that plan never came to fruition.
When the Whoopi video went viral here in South Africa, Dumisani appeared on Mo Flava’s Metro FM show in April 2020 to state that he had been trying to find his daughter.
“I have been looking for my daughter as well. You mustn’t forget these Americans. Americans will always want to have something to cause a stir, so that she stays in the media and is talked about around the world.”
Dumisani told Mo Flava that Doja’s management had blocked all his efforts to reach her.
He further suggested that it may be because they feared losing her.
“I have tried to search for my baby and the company that runs her entertainment has been blocking me. They know that if I could get hold of her, maybe she will disappear from the picture … I know my daughter, wherever she is, is looking for me,” said Dumisani.
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