Early in 2026 she stopped declining. She resigned from the bank and founded ZimbOriginal, a platform built less like a classroom than like a conversation: storytelling, book clubs, and what she calls buddy pairing — one learner matched with one speaker, talking until the words stop being homework.
The students pay $50 a month and come from Zimbabwe, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Ireland and Scotland. Nyashadzashe Machingura joins from Canada, across six or seven time zones depending on the season, which means one of them is always sitting down to a lesson in the dark — early morning in Harare, or late evening in Toronto.
Chidovi has noticed which learners stay. "When people are away from home, they long for home more than when they are home," she says. It is the people furthest from Zimbabwe who work hardest at its language.
The language she teaches has its own migration story. Standard Shona was assembled in 1931 by Clement Doke, a South African linguist commissioned by the government of Southern Rhodesia, who folded the Zezuru, Karanga, Manyika, Korekore and Ndau dialects into a single written form so that schoolbooks and Bibles could be printed once rather than five times. The spelling was revised twice more, in 1955 and 1967, which is why older Shona books look slightly foreign to readers trained on current textbooks.
Shona is still examined in Zimbabwean schools, but teaching above the early primary grades happens largely in English — one reason many Zimbabwean adults read their second language more easily than their first. Beyond the classroom, the support thins out. The large language apps have added Swahili, Zulu and Xhosa; Shona learners have mostly relied on university departments, church materials and private tutors. Google Translate took it on in December 2013, before any app did.
What Chidovi is using instead is a set of connections that already existed. Millions of Zimbabweans live abroad, and the money they send home has run above US$2 billion a year. The same corridors that carry remittances now carry lessons in the other direction — back from Harare to Toronto, Dublin, Glasgow.
The country's own name is Shona: dzimba dzemabwe, houses of stones, for the dry walls at Great Zimbabwe. Two dozen people are learning to say it the way it was meant to be said.