There’s no way to fully understand Tupac Amaru Shakur, one of the most brilliant and most promising talents of his generation, without understanding his mother, Afeni Shakur, a leader of the Black Panther Party in New York. And the best way to understand her is to acknowledge the oppressive systems that she sometimes prevailed against but that sometimes got the best of her.
There’s no way to fully understand Tupac Amaru Shakur, one of the most brilliant talents of his generation, without understanding his mother, Afeni Shakur, a leader of the Black Panther Party in New York.
Not that she would have necessarily said so: “I find it very difficult … to look at myself and say what did I do to influence someone who, in my view, was and is a great and tremendous and magnificent spirit,” Afeni Shakur said in an interview years after her talented son was killed.
But “Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur,” a five-part documentary series by director Allen Hughes, which premiered Friday on Hulu, doesn’t find it difficult at all. It’s all about their emotionally complex relationship and how her choices, circumstances and politics had an impact on her son’s art and his tragically short life.
Afeni Shakur was one of 21 Black Panther Party members initially accused of planning attacks on police stations. During her incarceration at the New York Women House of Detention, she was pregnant with the son she’d name after Túpac Amaru, the Incan emperor who fought the Spanish conquistadors. The torture the guards inflicted on her included sexual assault. But by using a gift of language that she would pass on to her son, Afeni Shakur successfully defended herself, and eventually all the Panters who were tried were acquitted.
But as the documentary illustrates, the acquittal didn’t stop the FBI from harassing her. Some have blamed the mother’s well-known addiction to crack cocaine on authorities sending crack dealers her way. Whatever the…
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