Kanye West's Family He Rarely Speaks About.. Pictures of Father, Step mother, Step sister and Others..

Bruce Jenner recently revealed that there is side of Kanye West rarely seen. He claims the rapper helped his wife Kim, understand Bruce's need to transition.  While Jay-Z dealt drugs and shot his own brother and Snoop Dogg was once charged with being an accessory to murder, Kanye learned to speak Chinese and do Tai Chi when he was ten and grew up in the middle class South Shore area of Chicago.



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Although his late mother, Donda, and his father, Ray, divorced when he was three, they remained amicable and Kanye lived with his mother but spent summers with his father.

It was on one such visit that the now 37-year-old rapper met future stepmother Brenda Bentley, who shared this exclusive snap of him aged nine.

She remembers him as a mild mannered boy who wouldn’t dare interrupt his father - let alone an awards ceremony - and always called her 'Miss Brenda.'

She recalls: 'We were on the Metro because we were going to a parade downtown.

'He was with his father, so he knew he had to behave. Ray wasn’t too strict as a dad, and it was summer – so that was playtime.

Kanye's Step mother Brenda

'Kanye was a curious person, he asked a lot of questions, his parents always encouraged him to do that. The kind of questions were not the kind of questions I’d have thought of a nine year old asking. He was pretty smart.

'He was quick with his responses, he said what was on his mind but he was never rude.'

Last week Bruce Jenner shed a little more light on Kanye's softer side in his now famous 20/20 interview with Diane Sawyer.

The 65-year-old reality star said it was the father of 20-month-old North who counciled wife Kim Kardashian into understanding her stepfather's gender identity.

'Kim told me a story. She goes, "You know what really turned me around on thinking about this?" I said, "What?" She goes, "Kanye." I went, "Oh, okay,"' Bruce said.

'[Kanye] says to Kim "Look, I can be married to the most beautiful woman in the world, and I am. I can have the most beautiful little daughter in the world, and I have that. But I'm nothing if I can't be me. If I can't be true to myself, they don't mean anything."'

Kanye and Father Ray West at a Lakers Game in 2011

Despite being a university professor, Donda claimed she was by no means rich and had to sometimes work two or three jobs, mainly teaching and lecturing, to make ends meet.

She noticed her son’s musical talents when he was eight and always encouraged him to pursue his music and drawing, although she obviously spoiled him, giving him $1,000 [677pounds] for his 14th birthday - which he spent on the keyboard with which he would start his music career.

Donda wrote: 'I rarely denied Kanye anything … I was very clever in saving my money and finding ways to give him things and exposing him to things without breaking our bank. Sometimes I would shuffle the bills to make sure he had something.'

Meanwhile, Kanye has himself described how his father occasionally struggled a little more to make ends meet.

He told Complex magazine: 'I remember he was in vacuum cleaner sales and he’d sit up there and show people how powerful the vacuum cleaner was by putting a penny on the floor and then the vacuum cleaner over it and then Pop! It would come out and he would have bent the penny.

'I remember some days we would ride around and he had vacuum cleaners in the back and we’d be going up a hill and the car would stop. And I just see him, like, "Not today. Not today."'

Kanye did well at high school and enrolled in the Chicago university where Donda was chair, but by that time his career as a producer was taking off and he got his big break in 2000 making tracks for Jay-Z’s album The Blueprint.

 

 

Kanye and his Late mom Donda.
Those around him say he started to get out of control after the death of Donda following a breast reduction operation in 2007, when he plunged into a deep, dark period.
But the rapper seems to have found his happiness in a family of his own, Kim and daughter North.