Kibeho, Nyaruguru District, Rwanda · 1981–1989
In a girls’ boarding school in the green hills of southern Rwanda, beginning on a November afternoon in 1981, the Mother of God appeared to three Rwandan schoolgirls. She came as “Nyina wa Jambo” — Mother of the Word — and what she said and showed them, no one then could understand. Eleven years later, the rivers of Rwanda would run with the blood of nearly a million people. Kibeho remains the only Vatican-approved Marian apparition site on the African continent, and a wound and a hope of the African Church.
Mother of the Word in Rwanda
On November 28, 1981, Alphonsine Mumureke, a sixteen-year-old student at Kibeho College, was serving lunch when she heard a voice calling her name. She saw a woman of “incomparable beauty” — neither white nor black, and more radiant than any human being. The woman called herself “Nyina wa Jambo” — “Mother of the Word.” Anastasie Mukamazimpaka, then twenty-one, began to see her in January 1982; Marie Claire Mukangango in March of that year. Several others reported visions in the years that followed; the bishops, after long investigation, recognized only these three as authentic.
Our Lady asked for prayer of the Rosary, conversion, fasting, and a deep love for the Mother of Sorrows — for whom she asked that the Seven Sorrows Rosary be revived. She showed Marie Claire and the others terrible visions: rivers of blood, bodies in the hills, headless corpses, a country tearing itself apart. They wept and could not stop weeping. The country and the Church did not yet know what those visions meant.
Twelve years later, in April 1994, the Rwandan genocide began. Within one hundred days, between eight hundred thousand and a million Rwandans were killed — most of them Tutsi, but also moderate Hutu, including some of the seers themselves. Marie Claire was killed at Kibeho. The Church recognized the apparitions in 2001. Our Lady had come, in love and in grief, to a country that would be asked to bear an unspeakable cross.
The Sanctuary Today
A great Shrine of Our Lady of Kibeho — the Sanctuary of Mary, Mother of the Word — has been built on the hill where the apparitions took place. It is a place of pilgrimage now for the whole African Church. Each year on November 28, the anniversary of the first apparition, tens of thousands gather. Alphonsine, the only living seer, lives a hidden life of prayer.
The shrine has become a place of reconciliation as well as devotion. Hutu and Tutsi pray together. The Seven Sorrows Rosary is prayed daily. Kibeho is a Marian sanctuary that does not let its visitor look away from suffering — and it is a place where the Mother of the Word has promised to remain.
A Prayer at Kibeho
Mother of the Word,
you who came to three Rwandan girls
and wept with them in advance
for a sorrow they could not yet name —
stand today with every people that bears genocide on its memory.
Stand with the survivors.
Stand with the killers who still cannot weep.
Let the Seven Sorrows you carried
teach us how to grieve, and how to forgive.
Mother of Africa, pray for us. Amen.
Live from Kibeho
The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Kibeho broadcasts the Holy Mass and the Seven Sorrows Rosary, particularly on the great anniversary of November 28 each year, when pilgrims from across Africa gather on the hill of the apparitions.
Visit & Learn More
- Sanctuary of Our Lady of Kibeho: kibeho-sanctuary.com
- Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Kibeho
Journey with Mary: A Path to Jesus 