Kibeho in southern Rwanda is a paradigm of the 20th century: the contrast between God’s grace and man’s potential for evil, and, another sign of our times, the media conspiracy of silence surrounding these momentous events. In this hilly district in central Africa, apparitions of the Blessed Virgin May to three teenage girls began on 28th November 1981 and were to continue for the next two years.
In a Catholic-run girls’ school, the Blessed Mother appeared to the three under the local name of the Mother of the Word, or the Mother of God, and told them to build a shrine to her there. The first stone of the shrine was laid ten years later to the day and has become a centre for conversion, reparation of the sins of the world, and reconciliation; and for those who aspire to the values of compassion and fraternity without borders, recalling the Gospel of the Cross – in words translated from the original French of the Declaration made by the Bishop of Gikongoro, Augustin Misage, on 29th June, 2001, feast of SS Peter and Paul, in the local cathedral. This public declaration, the result of almost twenty years of work of medical doctors and theologians, concerning the definitive judgment on the apparitions was released three days later by the Holy See.
The three visionaries were: Alphonsine Mumureke, now a cloistered nun living in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, who experienced mystical journeys where she was shown Heaven, Purgatory and Hell, and cured of several sicknesses; Nathalie Mugamazimpaka, who has stayed to serve in Kibeho parish, and who said that the Blessed Virgin came to show us what we’ve forgotten – prayer, conversion, penance and humility; and Marie Claire Mukangango, who married and was killed in the 1994 genocide. The visionaries experienced fasts and silences for up to 14 days. During the visions the three girls were shown scenes of the suffering to come: blood running, trees burning on hill-tops, mass graves and unburied corpses, skulls and beheaded bodies.
Some twelve years after the apparitions, Kibeho was to witness one of the worst massacres of the genocide, in which 25,000 people died; and one year after the genocide, a further massacre, of anywhere between 2,000 and 5,000 people, mainly women and children, when the national army tried to close an internationally-designated displacement persons’ camp and separate the genocidaires from other prisoners. This happened in the presence of hundreds of UN peacekeepers and many international NGOs. The Kibeho camp housed between 80,000 and 100,000 people at the time, spread over 9 square kilometres.
Pilgrims started flocking to Kibeho once the word began to spread, from the surrounding district, other parts of the country, and neighbouring countries Devotion to the Blessed Mother, or to Mother Mary –as she is called in Uganda- is deeply rooted in this part of Africa, which has the highest proportion of Catholics in the continent.
It is not uncommon for Catholic men or boys to wear rosary beads around the neck, which serves several purposes: to show their identity among their peers, remind themselves of God’s presence during the day, and, in these lands of “perpetual spring”, to remove at ease for use. Others, men and women, more discreetly, wear a ring rosary on their fingers. Many churches have grottoes of the Virgin in the grounds, which are frequented during the day by children and older worshippers. The Rosary is daily recited in many families, as a tradition, either before people leave the house for work or school, or at night when everyone is home. Often young people have told me that their grandmother or great-grandmother, now too old to work, sits at home in her thatched hut in the village, reciting the Rosary throughout the day. I know also of a boarding school near Kampala where the headmaster gets the 3,000 plus students to say the Rosary together every afternoon at 3.00 o’clock in the run-up to exams!
In Africa the “mother” plays a special role. She is the one who carries and gives birth to life. She is the provider and main worker; the one who helps keep the family together and heads it when the man is either unable, unwilling or dead. Even criminals, at the highest and lowest levels of the social scale, keep a special soft spot for their mother, if not for anyone else.
But, there is much opposition to the Blessed Mother, “the sign of contradiction”, spread by well-endowed fundamentalist groups mainly from the United States, who stir up their followers to condemn Catholics for “idol worship.” When trying to entice young Catholics away from their faith, the first point of attack is “statues” and devotion to the Blessed Virgin, which they wrongly call “worship of Mary”. But often too Mariology is the decisive point of doctrine that leads them back to the Church, and brings in new converts.
Martyn Drakard is the Spero correspondent for Africa.
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