Undisciplined Heart
Jane Katjavivi
ISBN 9789994557196
UNAM Press, 2024
When Jane Katjavivi becomes involved in London in support of change in Southern Africa, she meets and marries a Namibian activist in exile. Moving with him to Namibia at the time of Independence in 1990, she faces a new life in a starkly beautiful country. She starts to publish Namibian writing and opens a bookshop. In Windhoek she develops friendships with a group of strong, independent women, who have also come from other countries, and are engaged in different ways to overcome the divisions of the past. Over coffee, drinks and food, they support each other through times of happiness and sadness, through juggling careers and family, and through illness and death.
When her husband is made Ambassador to the Benelux countries and the European Union, and later Berlin, Jane has to build a new identity as the wife of an ambassador and come to terms with her own ill-health without her friends around her to support her. Set against the backdrop of the historical, political and social development of newly independent Namibia, Undisciplined Heart tells the story of Jane’s love for her family, friends and her adopted country, in a gentle and honest way that reflects the joys and tragedies of life.
The late Jane’s frank and intimate memoir of love, faith and politics, of survival and finding ways to make a home, shows that history is also what heals when it is filtered through a loving heart and an open mind. To this book, the Katjavivi family have added an epilogue of the years between the ending of her memoir and her death, including some of her own reflections. This final chapter is an epitaph to Jane’s life as a writer, publisher and book development activist in Namibia
