Since Tupac Shakur’s rise to stardom, he and his mother have made headlines all across the country. Even after their deaths, they continue to be topics of discussion. But there’s one person in their family you don’t hear much about – the slain rapper’s sister, Sekyiwa “Set” Shakur. Now, she’s sharing her story and she’s turned quite a few heads with what she has to say.
During a past interview with All Hip Hop, Sekyiwa shared details about the difficulties she’s faced over the years. Although she’s speaking out now, she wasn’t always open to sharing her life with the public. Her brother’s inability to escape the public eye influenced her decision to keep her personal life under wraps. “I kind of like my privacy. Because [as seen with] my brother, his real name was his stage name, he couldn’t escape into a private world. I didn’t want my identity out there.”
Over the years, she’s had bouts with bipolar disorder and depression. After years of silence, she decided to share her story by writing a column on AOL’s Black Voices. She explained how beauty, fashion, and the evolution of her clothing line, Madamevelli, have given her a way to cope with the difficulties she’s faced. When asked about the column, she shed light on her insecurities. With her brother in the limelight, her last name carried a lot of weight and she often felt like she didn’t measure up to the mainstream stereotypical views of beauty. For that reason, she often found herself, depressed.
“Growing up, dark-skinned, Black, with short hair, in a revolutionary family with a name like Shakur you deal with American issues with beauty, the girls with the pigtails. Were always the outcasts of the neighborhood, always the ugly girl with the short hair – the African. Then I started feeling a little better about myself, and The Color Purple comes out and now I look like Celie [the character played by Whoopi Goldberg]. My beauty was always who I am, and I took it from my mother, did my hair [naturally].”
Even after winning a beauty pageant in high school, she was faced with another life-changing experience that, once again, made her question her beauty. “When I was like 16 or 17, I won a beauty pageant in high school, something like the Black Nubian Queen. Six months after that, I got pregnant and I was a fat baby mama, living the life of a fat baby mama. When you have a beautiful person like Tupac as your brother, it’s a cruel mirror to look at, you know what I mean? He didn’t have the problems. I had the two of them [Khadafi and Tupac] once they died I wanted to put myself back to where they saw me. I had just let myself go.”
But things are quite different now. Set Shakur is a mother of two sons, Malik and Nzingha, whom she had with Outlawz member EDI. She’s now married to Gregory Jackson and focused on building her brand and fashion line, Madamevelli.
