Music documentaries tend to follow certain beats – upbringing; career beginnings; meteoric rise; inevitable fall. The director Allen Hughes is smart enough not to draw entirely outside these lines with Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur – his five-part docuseries about Tupac, one of the most famous and influential rappers of all time, and his Black Panther mother. The series moves at a snappy pace, and is told chronologically, while intercutting between Tupac’s youth and Afeni’s. At the same time, it is far more thorough and far more sweeping than many other music documentaries, and especially those about stars as culturally significant as Tupac. Hughes sows his seeds carefully, telling a story of Black oppression and liberation, complex and occasionally fraught familial bonds, and a rapidly shifting US culture with such deftness that, when Tupac’s meteoric rise does begin, it feels less like a sudden ascent than an inevitable claiming of his birthright as the progeny of a radical activist.
Accordingly, Dear Mama is as much about Afeni as it is about Tupac, detailing her life as a firebrand political activist and revered organiser, her struggles with drug use, and tumultuous relationship with her son. A leader of the Harlem Black Panthers, Afeni was arrested and put in jail in the late 60s, a few years before Tupac’s birth, as part of the Panther 21, a group of Black Panthers accused of conspiring to carry out a terrorist attack. She later represented herself in court, despite no formal legal training, and was acquitted, exposing an FBI conspiracy to frame the Panthers as terrorists in the process.
