Abel Shingange: The Man Behind the Infamy

Quick Bio

Detail	Info
Full Name	Ngisaveni Abel Shingange
Born	Circa 1966–1967, South Africa (exact birth date not publicly confirmed)
Nationality	South African
What He Does / Did	Automotive mechanic; later became known primarily as the stepfather of comedian Trevor Noah and for his documented history of domestic violence and criminal convictions
Biggest “Accomplishments”	This is a complicated category: Abel built and ran a mechanic shop in Johannesburg; married Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah in 1992; fathered two sons, Andrew and Isaac Shingange. He is also formally convicted of attempted murder (2009 shooting of Patricia) and faced a separate rape charge in 2015.
Other Key Facts	His Tsonga name, Ngisaveni, translates to “be afraid”; he is a member of the Tsonga ethnic group from the Tzaneen region of Limpopo; his story is told in detail in Trevor Noah’s bestselling memoir Born a Crime (2016)

Why People Keep Looking This Man Up

Most people searching for Abel Shingange are doing it because they just finished Trevor Noah’s memoir, or watched an interview where Noah talks about his childhood, and they want to know — what actually happened to this guy? Did he face consequences? Is Patricia okay? It’s a very human impulse. You read about something awful and you need to know the ending.

The honest truth is that Abel Shingange has no real public profile of his own. He was never famous. He never sought the spotlight. He spent his working life as a mechanic in Johannesburg, and that might have been the whole story — except that the woman he married had a son who become one of the world’s most well-known comedians, and that son penned a book that revealed everything. Now Abel’s name is tied permanently to one of the most widely read memoirs of the last decade, and to a shooting that became a chapter that readers say they can’t stop thinking about.

This is not a comfortable biography to write or read. But Abel’s story is real, it is documented, and it matters because stories like his are painfully common in South Africa and everywhere else. Understanding how someone like Abel becomes who he became is part of understanding a world we all share.

Childhood and Where He Came From

Abel Shingange was born in South Africa, believed to be in the mid-to-late 1960s — reports put him at around 49 years old in 2015, which places his birth roughly around 1966. His exact birthdate hasn’t been made part of the public record, and nothing from his early years has been independently documented outside of what Trevor Noah shares in his memoir.

What we know is that Abel grew up Tsonga — specifically connected to the Tzaneen area in what is now the Limpopo province, a lush, tropical region in the northeast of South Africa. The Tsonga people have a deeply patriarchal cultural tradition, something that would shape Abel’s worldview in ways that eventually became destructive. In the world he was raised in, men were providers and rulers of the home. Women cooked, bowed in the presence of male elders, and deferred. The domestic order was not questioned.

He grew up during apartheid, which meant growing up in a country engineered specifically to limit Black South Africans’ access to education, opportunity, and dignity. Regardless of his own shortcomings, Abel was born into a world of systematic oppression and brutality that affected every Black South African household of that age.

Becoming a Mechanic — The Career He Built

By the time Patricia Noah met him, Abel was working as a mechanic in Johannesburg. Patricia brought her orange Volkswagen Beetle in for maintenance with her little son Trevor, who was about six years old. That’s how it started. A customer-mechanic relationship that slowly drifted into friendship and then something more.

Abel was good at what he did. By most accounts, including Trevor’s own, he was an excellent mechanic. He was truly skilled with engines and had a knack for maintaining machinery. People respected his technical abilities. Patricia, who was sharp, resourceful, and always looking for the angle that would build a better life, saw something in him beyond the grease-stained work clothes.

When they eventually married in 1992 — after several years of dating — Abel bought the mechanic shop. Patricia stepped in to help run the business side of it. She was organized and driven in ways that Abel was not, and under her management the shop actually started doing well. This detail matters, because it becomes one of the fault lines in their relationship. Patricia’s competence threatened him. A man raised to believe he should control everything found himself in a situation where his wife was, quietly and practically, carrying more than half the load.

The Marriage — What Went Wrong and When

The warning signs were there before Patricia and Abel ever walked down the aisle. Trevor Noah — who was a kid watching all of this unfold — tried to talk his mother out of the marriage. He’d already seen Abel’s temper flare in frightening ways, including an incident involving a child near a mulberry tree that left a young Trevor genuinely shaken. Patricia, being Patricia, made her own choice.

They married in a small ceremony in 1992. Abel had brought Patricia into his Tsonga world — visiting his family in Tzaneen for Christmas, navigating traditions that required women to bow before men, to speak only when permitted, to serve without complaint. Patricia did not adapt. She found the customs offensive and said so. She was not built for submission.

Abel, meanwhile, stopped smoking marijuana at Patricia’s insistence when they married. He substituted it with alcohol, and the drinking crept into his days — starting at the garage, continuing through the evening. It made an already domineering man more erratic.

The physical violence began. Abel hit Patricia. He hit Trevor. There were incidents that were reported to police, and police who essentially waved them off — told Patricia to calm down, sent Abel home with no charges. That was South Africa in the 1990s for domestic violence complaints: the system wasn’t built to protect women in those situations.

After the birth of their sons Andrew and then Isaac, something shifted further in Abel. He had his own children now, and Trevor — Patricia’s eldest, the mixed-race son from a different relationship, a child who didn’t belong to Abel and couldn’t be controlled by him — became a target of escalating hostility. Trevor represented everything outside Abel’s grip. For his own protection, Patricia eventually assisted Trevor in leaving the house.

The Divorce That Didn’t End It

Patricia and Abel officially divorced in 1996, roughly four years after their marriage. But divorce didn’t sever what was really happening. Abel didn’t see the end of the marriage as the end of his claim on Patricia’s life. In his mind — warped by the same patriarchal certainty that had governed him from childhood — she remained his in some essential way.

Patricia moved forward. She eventually got engaged to another man, Sifiso Khoza, and moved out of the backyard shack near their old neighbourhood into a different home. She was building a new life.

When Abel found out, he lost what remained of his composure.

The Shooting — October 2009

On a Sunday in 2009, Abel turned up at Patricia’s home. He had a gun. Patricia’s sons Andrew and Isaac were there. Isaac, Abel’s own biological child, was present and desperately tried to talk his father down.

Abel shot Patricia in the leg. He then gave her a back-of-the-head shot. The bullet entered through the base of her skull and, by a mercy that defies probability, exited through her nostril without destroying her brain. She survived.

Abel then went around to his friends and family and told them what he had done and declared he would finish the job. He eventually turned himself in to police.

Patricia Noah was taken to hospital and recovered. The bullet’s trajectory — the angle at which it entered, the path it took — is the only reason she is alive today.

Abel pleaded guilty to attempted murder. The case dragged through the courts for about three years. In 2012 he was convicted. In 2015, when he was finally due to be formally sentenced, he didn’t show up to court — because he had already been arrested again. This time on a rape charge. While awaiting sentencing, he had committed another felony, forfeiting his bail.

The Sentence and What Came After

For the attempted murder of Patricia Noah, Abel Shingange received three years of correctional supervision — essentially a community-based sentence rather than traditional imprisonment. Many people found that sentence shockingly light given what he had done.

The rape charge that surfaced in 2015 brought him back into custody and added another layer to his criminal record. The final outcome of that case hasn’t been extensively reported in sources that are publicly available and verified. What is confirmed is that he was in Johannesburg Prison — the facility locals call Sun City — when he was supposed to be appearing for his murder sentencing.

As of the public record available today, Abel Shingange lives out of the public eye. His sons Andrew and Isaac have kept low profiles. He doesn’t appear to be connected to Trevor Noah in any way.

Money and Financial Standing

There is no public information about Abel’s finances or net worth. He was a working mechanic who owned a shop in Johannesburg, a business that Patricia helped run and that was reportedly doing reasonably well during the marriage. After the divorce and his subsequent legal troubles, whatever financial stability he had built was almost certainly dismantled.

It is commonly stated that Trevor Noah has a net worth of approximately $100 million; however, this is solely due to Trevor’s exceptional career. Abel has no connection to that wealth.

Where Things Stand Today

Abel Shingange is not a public figure and does not appear to seek visibility. His story is told through the lens of Trevor Noah’s memoir and through South African court records — neither of which he controls or has commented on publicly. Whatever his life looks like now, it is happening far from any spotlight.

Patricia Noah survived, remarried, and continues to live in Johannesburg. Trevor Noah has spoken about her survival and about the experience of nearly losing her with remarkable candour, using it to illuminate the broader crises of domestic violence and gender-based violence in South Africa. Andrew and Isaac Shingange appear to be living private lives.

Final Words

The fact that Abel Shingange is more than just a monster in someone else’s tale makes it difficult to write about him honestly. He was a person shaped by apartheid-era South Africa, by a deeply patriarchal culture, by substance abuse, and by whatever personal failures and fractures he carried that we will never fully see. That doesn’t justify what he did. Nothing does. Shooting someone in the head is not the product of culture or circumstance alone — it’s a choice made by a person.

What makes Abel’s story notable — beyond the celebrity connection — is how perfectly it illustrates the way domestic violence escalates when systems fail to intervene. Patricia reported him to police multiple times before the shooting. She was turned away repeatedly. The systems designed to protect people like her didn’t. And so a woman nearly died on a Sunday morning in Johannesburg, in front of her children, because a bullet happened to travel the right way through her skull.

Abel Shingange is not a cautionary tale about one bad man. He’s a window into what happens when a society fails to take violence against women seriously until it’s almost too late.

FAQs

1. Who is Abel Shingange?

He is a South African man who worked as an automotive mechanic in Johannesburg. He is primarily known as the ex-stepfather of comedian and former Daily Show host Trevor Noah, and for his conviction for the attempted murder of Trevor’s mother, Patricia.

2. What is his full name?

His full Tsonga name is Ngisaveni Abel Shingange. “Ngisaveni” translates to “be afraid” in the Tsonga language. He was generally known as Abel.

3. How did he meet Patricia Noah?

When Trevor was around six years old, Patricia took her orange Volkswagen Beetle to the shop where Abel worked as a mechanic. Over time, a friendship developed and eventually became a romantic relationship.

4. What was the date of their marriage and divorce?

They married in 1992 and officially divorced in 1996, making their marriage roughly four years long.

5. Did they have children together?

Yes. They had two sons: Andrew Shingange (born about a year into the marriage) and Isaac Shingange (born later). Both are Trevor Noah’s half-brothers.

6. Was Abel abusive throughout the marriage?

Yes. According to Trevor Noah’s memoir and subsequent reporting, Abel was physically violent toward both Patricia and Trevor during the marriage. Police were called multiple times but declined to press charges.

7. What happened in 2009?

In October 2009, Abel tracked down Patricia at her new home — she had moved out and become engaged to another man — and shot her twice: once in the leg as well as once in the rear of the head. She survived. Their son Isaac was present and begged his father to stop.

8. Was he punished for the shooting?

He pleaded guilty to attempted murder. After a process that took about three years, he was convicted in 2012. His formal sentencing in 2015 was delayed when it emerged he was already in custody on a separate rape charge. For the attempted murder, he was finally sentenced to three years of correctional supervision, a punishment that many felt was too light.

9. What was the rape charge?

In April 2015, Abel was arrested and charged with rape while he was out on bail awaiting his murder sentencing. He had violated his bail conditions. Details of the outcome of this case are not extensively documented in the publicly available record.

10. What does Trevor Noah say about him?

Noah discusses Abel extensively in Born a Crime (2016). He portrays Abel as a man whose traditional Tsonga beliefs about male authority were fundamentally incompatible with Patricia’s independence, and whose violence escalated as a result. Noah has also spoken in interviews about using humor and storytelling to process trauma.

11. Is there any relationship between Abel and Trevor today?

There is no publicly reported contact or relationship between them. Trevor Noah has been open about the impact Abel’s violence had on his family but has not indicated any reconciliation.

12. What happened to Patricia after everything?

Patricia Noah survived the shooting, recovered, and married Sifiso Khoza. She has remained a central, beloved figure in Trevor’s life — he has frequently described her as his greatest inspiration. She is still very much alive and resides in Johannesburg.

Explore new ideas and rising trends with Trend Rise.