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the same children from Grade One to Five, Miss Rwodzi stayed with us for five years.
She encouraged us to read everything written on anything, be it on a blackboard, a piece of paper, a novel or a lost comic on the adventures of Chunk Charlie. 
When Miss Rwodzi was not in the mood to teach, she gave us a Shona novel to read chapter-by-chapter while we sat under a tree.
Our most favourite book was Pfumo Reropa or Bloody Spear by Patrick Chakaipa. The book was set in pre-colonial days before British settlers came. In those days, the land belonged to the kings and his clansmen, madzimambo nevemadzinza avo.
In the very first paragraph of the book, greedy King Ndyire takes a walk around his kingdom.
He comes across the beautiful VaMunhamo. 
She is busy digging some root medicine for her sick baby. She is suddenly confronted by the presence of His Majesty. He says to her, “Why does the mother of my heart look surprised as if she has never seen me before?” 
She replies that she did not expect his Lordship to pass by her area of the woods. He replies: “Why would I not pass by here? My heart is where the virgin land resides. Pane gombo ndipo pane moyo wangu.”
VaMunhamo realises that the king was going into a conversation not proper for a married woman to engage in. She politely tells the king that virgin land should indeed be available for others to take if it is not taken already.
However, if the land is already being ploughed by another owner, nyamuzvinagombo, it is not possible for anyone to take it unless, of course, the original owner is dead.
The king tells her that he owns every single bit of land in the country and nobody can stop him from taking whatever piece of land he so wishes to take. Then King Ndyire declares: “I want this virgin land. I will plough on it and see what happens.” 
The very following day at dawn, King Ndyire sends his army to raid VaMunhamo’s village, killing her husband and sparing only her and her baby son. It is a tragic story of love, romance and the heroism of Tanganeropa, Munhamo’s son.
When we read this book in Grade Five, we thought King Ndyire’s declaration to plough the gombo was very romantic. Around the schoolyard, a boy would grab your skinny shoulder, almost tearing the blue uniform away and say, “Gombo iri ndarida, ndicharirima chete! (I want this virgin land, I will plough through it!”)
Then we would giggle and run away, asking the impatient boy to choose another gombo because this one was taken.
Then the boy grabbed you by both shoulders and demanded to know who the owner of the gombo was so he could either pay him back all his bride price or simply get his spears and fight until he wins the gombo for himself.
We loved to read anything. But outside school, there was nothing to read except letters from husbands and lovers working in Salisbury (Harare) or Bulawayo. The letters arrived by bus once a week. 
The bus conductor gave them to shopkeeper Muzorori at Muzorori & Sons Store.
The letters were all kept in the brown cardboard box on the counter.  Anyone could check the box looking for letters to St Columbus School. 
A letter going to someone in our village or beyond the Save River was read by many people several times over a few days before it reached its destination.
By the time it arrived in the hands of the intended loved one, the envelope would have been sealed and resealed with saliva many times until the last reader tried to use the milk of a hedge as glue. Even then the envelope was never fully sealed.
The most read letters came from Barnabas, who worked for Kango, the iron-making saucepan company in Bulawayo. He was in love with Miriro, his childhood sweetheart. Barnabas’ letters to Miriro passed through our hands at St Columbus School.
By the time it arrived, the letter was already open and my job was to read it to everyone in class during break time while Miss Rwodzi, our class teacher, was at tea. 
Barnabas had a beautiful cursive handwriting and he was very poetic.
He wrote that Miriro was as beautiful as the moon in the dry season, mwedzi wejenaguru, and her eyes were like stars. His love for her felt like fresh new leaves and she was the chisipiti, spring well in the valley always nourishing his thirsty heart.
Barnabas also said Miriro was his wild fruit, roro rangu, the yellow custard fruit or dzambiringa, the black olive-like fruit from the thorny tree. Sometimes he called her shuku, zhumwi, damba, gaka, the cucumber, sweet potato, chimbambaira and hute.
In one letter he called her his candy cake, chikhendikheki, heart killer, chipondamwoyo and we all wondered what that looked like.
When Barnabas discovered new Western fruits, he called Miriro his mulberry, muhabhurosi wangu, or his peach, mupichisi wangu. He even drew flowers and a heart with an arrow going through it on the envelope.
Reading Barnabas’ letters to Miriro became a habit at break time. One time we could not stop laughing when he wrote that Miriro’s breasts were like two hills competing for height. 
Miss Rwodzi heard the laughter and came back quickly. She said it was wrong to read other people’s letters so publicly like that.
Then she lectured to us on the values of preserving another person’s privacy. “In Salisbury, you can go to jail for what you are doing,” she said. 
But we told her that we only wanted to learn new romantic words in the letters. At the same time, our joint efforts also corrected the spelling and grammar in the letter before delivery. 
A year after his departure from the village and several letters later, Barnabas came home for the Rhodes and Founder’s holidays. We saw him with Miriro at Muzorori & Sons Store. 
Barnabas wore black sunglasses, gray bell bottom pants, a yellow shirt, a black tie and checked black and a white jacket with two vents at the back. His hair was a big Afro.
He smoked cigarettes and chewed gum while holding a big bottle of beer in one hand. The other hand was gently suspended on Miriro’s shoulder. The two of them sat on the bench outside Muzorori & Sons Store listening to music and watching people dance to a song called “Shambala”. 
Miriro looked shy but proud, drinking Fanta and eating buns. He called her sheri yangu, my sweet cherry.   We had never seen a cherry.
We stood there admiring Miriro. We were envious. This was real love.
When Barnabas spotted me and some other village friends in the crowd of shoppers, he did not ask us about the letters. Instead, he happily greeted us and even bought us a bottle of Fanta each and a packet of biscuits to share. 
Then he told us to take notes from his love letters to Miriro because real love could only be expressed through writing, not just talking. 
Gradually, as we grew older, the language of love became more advanced with the help of music and more books.
At boarding school, the most romantic guy was the one who could write a letter with big words, mavhoko.
One guy called Kizito wrote love letters with so many big words. Sometimes he sent the same letter, except for the change of the name, to three girls in one day. When he was not writing and sending messengers with letters, Kizito spoke to a girl without stopping or pausing: “I love you so much that I want to marry you and together we will live in the paradise of love among roses and lilies.
“Your mouth oozes with honey and you smell like the incense used by the Queen of Sheba. I shall marry you and you will give birth to sons that will carry my father’s name and bring forth a whole nation of the Gushungo clan.” 
During school holidays, Kizito did not study. Instead, he wrote and memorised all of Clarence Carter, Rod Stewart, Percy Sledge, Neil Diamond and Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” songs.
Sometimes he took all the lyrics from one romantic song and put them in a letter to the girls he courted. Even though the girls knew exactly where the words came from, they still imagined that the words came straight out of Kizito’s mouth.
He called each one of them “my babe”.
Every Saturday night, the boarding school held entertainment night and Kizito picked the more urban type girls to dance with. His most favourite girl was Moreblessings.
They held each other very close and danced to “Islands in the Stream” by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rodgers. We all took a deep breath when the song finished. That dance was way too close and possibly quite unholy.
We did not write or read much romance during the war. Buses stopped coming to the village. Muzorori was abducted one night and killed. The store and all the love letters in the brown cardboard box were burnt too. We left the village and ended up in a crowded two-bed-roomed flat in Glen Norah.
We could hear Fleetwood Mac, Clarence Carter and Otis Redding blurring from the windows of bachelor flats. These were the most romantic guys in Salisbury. They did not look at skinny village girls from Methodist boarding schools in the rural areas like me.
We saw them going for long walks along the Mukuvisi River holding hands. In the married flats, we saw newly married couples calling each other honey, sweetheart, sugar, darling, and lovey.
Soon after the first child was born, the sweetie, honey, lovey, darling language stopped. She was called Mai Chipo, or Chipo’s mother or just iwe. Maybe the darlings or mudiwa stayed in the bedroom. The public language of love changed so quickly after marriage.
Over the years, we have been busy Westernising love too much and forgetting the traditional respect hidden in the language of love. Now we have run out of the language to speak and sing of love. 
Worse still, the letters of love are lost. They have become extinct and the postman no longer brings any love letters. All he brings are electricity bills from Zesa and water bills from the local municipality.
Text messages and Facebook have also killed real long-lingering romance. We have very few meaningful words of love.
The latest I heard is like chimoko, the slang new name for a beautiful fat girl. Words like mudiwa to a loved one are already overused. Mudiwa is a name used for every one we love.
Children are called mudiwa, your wife is mudiwa, your husband is mudiwa and even a close friend is mudiwa.
Surely there are some other meaningful words to capture and describe that beautiful woman Chihera or Mamoyo. The gombo of our modern times is still there.
She just needs a new name.
Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic. She holds a PhD in International Relations and is a consultant.