Signifyin' and Testifyin'

Nothando Zulu has a heart full of good stories. But like others who have earned the title of master storyteller, she usually waits to take a look out at her audience before choosing just the right one to tell. Schoolchildren might hear a tale about an eclipse that encourages them to never let anyone extinguish their light, while adults might get to enjoy listening to Zulu, a founding member of Minnesota’s Black Storytellers Alliance, telling her favorite tale, which she calls “the eagle story.”

In it, a baby eagle raised by a farmer doesn’t know what he is or where he is supposed to be until an older, wiser bird asks why he is on the ground and teaches the eagle to fly. “The young eagle tells his older brother what happened, but his brother isn’t ready to listen and just keeps walking around,” Zulu says. “But the young eagle realizes that his parents had power in the sky and that he belongs there; so he keeps flying.”

It’s a story of hope, which is why she likes telling it most in prisons and other places where people are trying to overcome difficult things, like addiction. Also an actress, monologist and comedian, Zulu has been performing for more than 30 years in Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as Ghana and South Africa, and she has seen over and over again how inspiring, healing and empowering it can be to tell and listen to stories.

That’s why she is committed to the Alliance’s mission to maintain the art of storytelling and its ability be positive and educational. Recently, she helped organize the Alliance’s annual Signifyin’ & Testifyin’ event. Made possible by a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, the three-day event offered free storytelling performances for people of all ages, including three daytime shows for elementary school children at the Robert J. Jones Outreach and Urban-Engagement Center (UROC). Zulu was thrilled that each of the three storytelling sessions were filled to capacity, with more than 675 students attending performances at UROC. “The students who were called upon to become characters in some of the stories were enthusiastic and very much engaged,” Zulu recalls.

Though she wasn’t a Signifyin’ & Testifyin’ storyteller this year, Zulu has performed many times at UROC for different events. She and her husband, Vusumuzi Zulu, who is also a storyteller, have lived on the Northside a few blocks from UROC for nearly 50 years. During that time, they raised four kids and witnessed a lot of change. “It’s exciting how the community has come together and worked on a lot of things,” she says. “For us, storytelling is one of the ways we serve and give back to our community too,” she explains.

One of the things Zulu loves most is inspiring others to tell their own stories. Last summer she was doing some storytelling workshops with elementary-school kids for a residency project when two sixth-grade boys came up to talk to her toward the end of a class. “They were so excited,” she recalls. “They thanked me for teaching them and said: ‘We didn’t realize we could tell stories, but now we do.’  That meant so much to me that they were inspired to tell their own stories. I was over 40 years old when I realized storytelling was my calling, and I’m going to keep on telling them because that’s what keeps me going.”