By Adeyemi Moronfolu
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| Afeni Shakur |
Tupac’s mother died with net worth more than $50 million, she had been the arbiter of her son's estate, which
reportedly reaps almost $1 million annually and had been paying her more than
$20,000 a month. She died without a will and there is bound to be a legal war
between her former husband, Gust Davis, Shakur's daughter (and Tupac Shakur's
sister), Sekyiwa Shakur.
Born Alice Faye Williams, Afeni
Shakur changed her name when she became politically active in the 1960s and
joined the Black Panther Movement. By 1971, she was pregnant and behind bars,
accused of conspiring to bomb New York City landmarks.
She said the charges were brought
after the Panthers took over a school to make a point about continuing to
educate children during a teacher's strike in 1968.
Recalling the case years later, she
said they were accused of conspiring to commit murder and arson, to blow up the
Bronx Botanical Garden and the Abercrombie & Fitch and Macy's department
stores, and even police stations. All the charges were ultimately dismissed,
and her son was born soon after she left jail.
She named him Tupac Amaru, after the
last Incan emperor, who led a rebellion and refused to surrender to Spanish
conquistadors.
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| Afeni Shakur with Tupac |
As Afeni Shakur bounced from New York
City to Baltimore to California, she became addicted to drugs and struggled as
a single mother. Still, she managed to enroll Tupac in arts schools and other
programmes where he honed the musical and acting skills that would make him a
hip-hop icon.
"Arts can save children, no
matter what's going on in their homes," she told The Associated Press in a
2005 interview. "I wasn't available to do the right things for my son. If
not for the arts, my child would've been lost."
But Afeni Shakur left a deep
impression on her son, helping to shape a world view that later made him stand
out among other young rappers, with songs reflecting his own rebellious
attitude toward racism, poverty, violence and other social problems.
Tupac, in turn, revered his mother,
praising her in his 1995 elegy, "Dear Mama," a hit song many fans
recalled Tuesday in tweets and posts."You are appreciated," he says,
rapping about the sacrifices she made for him and his sister, Sekyiwa Shakur.
"Ain't a woman alive that could take my mama's place."
Tupac Shakur died in a still-unsolved
drive-by shooting in 1996, at age 25. Conspiracies about his killers
flourished. His mother considered them a waste of time.
"We decided to deal with the
living. This is justice for me," she said in 2005. "I need to do what
God has put in front of me to do, and it ain't trying to figure out who killed
Tupac."
For the last two decades of her life,
Afeni Shakur focused on keeping her son's legacy alive while managing his
musical catalog.
She opened the Tupac Amaru Shakur
Center for the Arts in Georgia — a project focused on helping at-risk youth
that is now defunct.
She also co-produced a Broadway
musical, "Holler If Ya Hear Me," that used his songs — including
"Me Against the World," ''California Love" and "Keep Ya
Head Up" — to tell an original story by Todd Kreidler about two young men
dealing with life and tragedy in a Midwestern industrial city. It closed
quickly in 2014 after playing just 38 performances.
And she served as executive producer
on a film about Tupac Shakur's life, "All Eyez on Me," which is set
to be released in the fall with Demetrius Shipp Jr., playing her son.
Seven years ago, she donated a
collection of her son's writings, including rough drafts of lyrics and poems
and a photocopy of his contract with Suge Knight and Death Row Records, to the
Robert W. Woodruff Library at Atlanta University Centre.
"We need to read history from
the source," she said. "It gives people the opportunity to judge him
objectively. What we want to do is educate."
Culled from Yahoo.
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