Africa Pilgrimage Sites for Christians

1. Where Christians Go on Pilgrimage in Africa

Christian pilgrimage in Africa is older than Christian pilgrimage in most of Europe, and it is still going on. Ethiopians have been walking to Lalibela and Axum for many centuries. Ugandans walk to Namugongo every June in numbers that fill a hillside. Algerians and Tunisians live among the ruins of the cities that produced Tertullian, Cyprian, Perpetua, Felicity, Monica and Augustine, and small Christian communities keep those sites in use. West African Catholics go to Yamoussoukro, Senegalese Catholics to Popenguine, Kenyans to Subukia, South Africans to Ngome, Rwandans to Kibeho.

What confuses newcomers is that these sites do not belong to one church. Lalibela and Axum belong to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which is Oriental Orthodox and is in communion with neither Rome nor Constantinople. Namugongo is Catholic on one side of the road and Anglican on the other, honouring martyrs killed in the same persecution. Hippo Regius is a state archaeological site in Algeria with a Catholic basilica standing above it and a very small Catholic community around it. A pilgrim who wants to travel honestly needs to know whose house he is entering.

The Ethiopian churches read the eighth chapter of Acts as their own charter. Philip is sent down the desert road from Jerusalem to Gaza, finds a court official of the Kandake reading Isaiah in a chariot, explains the passage to him and baptises him at the first water they come to (Acts 8:26-39). Whatever the geography of the ancient kingdom of Kush, that passage has shaped how Ethiopian and Eritrean Christians understand their own antiquity, and it is quoted at pilgrim sites across the highlands.

What this page covers, and what it leaves out

This guide deliberately stops at the borders of Egypt. The Holy Family route through the Nile Delta, the desert monasteries of Wadi Natrun and Scetis, and the shrines of the Coptic Orthodox Church are a large subject of their own with a different history, and our guide to the Coptic Orthodox Church covers that tradition. For the growth of Christian populations across the continent, the denominational picture and the demographic argument, see our guide to Christianity in Africa. This page is about the places themselves and how a pilgrim uses them.

The Catholic Church treats pilgrimage as an expression of popular piety that surrounds the sacramental life of the Church without replacing it (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1674). Nothing on this page is required of anyone, and none of it works automatically. For the theology underneath the practice, see our guide to what a pilgrimage is.

2. The Four Roads at a Glance

African Christian pilgrimage sorts into four groups, each with its own custodian church, its own season and its own kind of claim. The table below is the map of the rest of this guide.

Two features distinguish this continent from the European pilgrimage map. The first is that walking is normal. Great numbers of African pilgrims arrive on foot, having set out days or weeks earlier, and the walk is understood as the pilgrimage rather than as transport to it. The second is that a large share of these sites are shrines of martyrs from living memory. Namugongo commemorates killings of the 1880s, Kibeho stands in a country that suffered a genocide in 1994, and Tibhirine is a monastery whose community was taken in 1996. African pilgrimage tends to be about witness under pressure, and the crowds know it.

Feast dates in the table are the fixed calendar dates observed at each shrine. The Ethiopian feasts follow the Ethiopian calendar, so their Gregorian dates are the usual conversions and can shift by a day in a Gregorian leap year.

3. Lalibela and the Rock-Hewn Churches

Lalibela is a town in the Lasta mountains of northern Ethiopia where eleven churches were cut downward out of solid volcanic rock, each carved as a single piece with its roof at ground level and its walls, windows, pillars and interiors hollowed out below. Masons cut downward into living rock and hollowed each church out of a single mass, which makes every one of them a sculpture the size of a building. They are joined by trenches, tunnels and rock-cut passages, and they have been in continuous liturgical use since they were made. UNESCO inscribed them on the World Heritage List in 1978.

The World Heritage inscription of the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela in 1978 is published by UNESCO in its World Heritage List.

Ethiopian tradition attributes the churches to King Gebre Mesqel Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty, who reigned around the turn of the thirteenth century, and the town, formerly called Roha, took his name. The tradition holds that he intended a new Jerusalem in the highlands after pilgrimage to the old one became difficult, which is why a watercourse at the site is called the Jordan and why one of the churches is Bete Golgotha. Archaeologists differ over whether all eleven belong to a single reign or whether older cut chambers were extended into churches over a longer period. The Church's own account and the archaeological debate can both be reported without resolving them.

The three groups

Pilgrims and guides divide the site into three parts, and knowing the division makes the visit intelligible.

• The northern group, on one side of the seasonal stream called the Jordan, holds Bete Medhane Alem (House of the Saviour of the World), the largest of the eleven churches at the site, along with Bete Maryam, Bete Meskel, Bete Danagel and the linked Bete Golgotha Mikael.
• The eastern group, across the watercourse, holds Bete Amanuel, Bete Merkorios, Bete Abba Libanos and Bete Gabriel-Rufael, reached by trenches and a tunnel that pilgrims walk in darkness.
• Bete Giyorgis, the House of St George, stands apart to the south west. It is cut in the shape of a Greek cross down into a rock pit, so that a visitor first meets it by looking down at its roof. It is the image most people have seen of Ethiopia.

What happens there

Lalibela works as a living parish system. Priests and deacons serve the churches daily, the walls carry painted and carved figures, and each church keeps its tabot, the consecrated altar tablet that in Ethiopian practice makes a building a church. Pilgrims remove their shoes at the door, and many spend the night in the trenches wrapped in white shawls before a great feast. The largest gathering of the year is Genna, Ethiopian Christmas, kept on 7 January in most years, when the town fills and the night offices run until dawn in the pit around Bete Giyorgis.

For a Catholic visitor the practical rules are simple. The liturgy is that of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, an Oriental Orthodox body which separated from the imperial Church after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and which is not in communion with Rome. You may attend, stand, pray and venerate. You do not present yourself for Holy Communion. There is also an Ethiopian Catholic Church of the Ge'ez rite, one of the Eastern Catholic Churches, with its own parishes and its own liturgy in the same tradition, and a Catholic pilgrim will usually find Mass through them.

4. Axum, Mary of Zion and the Ark Tradition

Axum, in Tigray, is where Ethiopian Christianity begins as a matter of record. The kingdom of Aksum adopted Christianity under King Ezana in the fourth century, and the coinage of his reign changes from a disc and crescent to a cross, which is why numismatists treat the conversion as datable in a way few ancient conversions are. Ethiopian tradition credits the mission to Frumentius, remembered as Abba Selama, who was consecrated bishop for the Aksumites by St Athanasius of Alexandria, an act that ties the Ethiopian church to Alexandria for the next sixteen centuries.

The centre of the site is the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion. A church has stood here since the fourth century by Ethiopian account, destroyed and rebuilt more than once. The older surviving church was rebuilt under Emperor Fasilides in the seventeenth century and is open to men only. A large modern domed church was added under Emperor Haile Selassie in the twentieth century and is open to all. Between them stands a small chapel.

The chapel of the Tablet

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church holds that the Ark of the Covenant, the ark of Exodus 25 and 1 Kings 8, is kept in that chapel at Axum. One monk is appointed guardian for life, he does not leave the enclosure, and no one else is admitted, including bishops and heads of state. The tradition is carried in the Kebra Nagast, a fourteenth-century compilation which tells how Menelik, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, brought the Ark from Jerusalem to Ethiopia.

This site states the claim as the Ethiopian Church states it and does not adjudicate it. The claim is unverifiable by design, since verification would require the very access the tradition forbids, and the Catholic Church has never made any pronouncement on it. What is beyond dispute is the effect. Every Ethiopian Orthodox church contains a tabot, a replica altar tablet of the Ark, kept in the sanctuary, carried in procession on great feasts and treated as the thing that makes the building a church. The whole architecture and ritual of Ethiopian Christianity is built around that idea.

The great pilgrimage day at Axum is Hidar Tsion, the feast of Mary of Zion, kept on 21 Hidar in the Ethiopian calendar, which falls at the end of November. Pilgrims come from across the country and camp on the ground around the compound.

That verse, in its older English rendering about Ethiopia stretching out her hands to God, has been quoted in Ethiopian and in African-American Christianity for centuries as a text about the continent's place in salvation history. The Hebrew word is Cush, the kingdom on the upper Nile, and the ancient Greek and Latin translations rendered it Ethiopia, which is how the association was made.

5. Debre Damo, Debre Libanos and Lake Tana

Ethiopian monasticism is a pilgrimage world of its own, and three sites carry most of the traffic. Each has a distinct character, and each has a rule that a visitor has to accept before arriving rather than argue with at the gate.

Debre Damo

Debre Damo sits on an amba, a flat-topped mountain in Tigray with sheer sides, and the only way up is a leather rope hauled by the monks at the top, a climb of roughly fifteen metres up bare rock. The monastery is attributed to Abuna Aregawi, one of the Nine Saints, missionaries remembered as arriving in the sixth century and credited with the spread of monasticism and of the translation of Scripture into Ge'ez. The church on the summit dates from an early period of Ethiopian Christianity and has a carved wooden ceiling.

Debre Damo admits men only. Women are not permitted on the mountain, and the rule extends to female animals. Pilgrims who cannot make the climb, and there are many, pray at the foot of the cliff. Stating this plainly is a kindness, because groups regularly arrive without knowing it and half the group is left below.

Debre Libanos

Debre Libanos lies north of Addis Ababa in a gorge of the Blue Nile system, founded in the thirteenth century by Tekle Haymanot, venerated across Ethiopia, whose feast fills the site. The monastery became the head of one of the two great monastic families of the Ethiopian church, and its abbot held a recognised place in the imperial order.

Debre Libanos is also a martyrs' site. In May 1937, during the Italian occupation and in reprisal for an attempt on the life of the viceroy Rodolfo Graziani, occupation forces carried out a massacre of the monks and deacons of the monastery. Historians disagree about how many were killed and the estimates vary widely, so this page gives no figure. What is not in dispute is that the community was destroyed as a community, and Ethiopians treat the place as a shrine of that killing as well as of its founder.

The 1937 massacre at Debre Libanos is documented in the scholarly literature on the Italian occupation of Ethiopia and in Italian military records examined by historians. Casualty estimates differ substantially between published accounts, which is why no number is given here.

The Lake Tana islands

Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile, holds a scatter of island and peninsula monasteries reached by boat, several of them with round churches whose inner walls are covered in painted scenes of Scripture and of Ethiopian saints. Ura Kidane Mihret on the Zege peninsula is the easiest of them to reach, and its painted walls are the ones usually reproduced in books about Ethiopia. Kebran Gabriel and Daga Estifanos admit men only. Tana Qirqos carries a local tradition that the Ark rested there for centuries before it was taken to Axum, which is the same body of tradition described above.

The Tana monasteries also served as treasuries. Manuscripts, crowns and processional crosses were kept on the islands because water is a defence, and several of the houses still hold their libraries. Pilgrims come for the feasts of the patron saints, and the boats fill on those days with people who are not tourists.

6. Kulubi Gabriel and Timkat at Gondar

Two Ethiopian occasions draw crowds larger than any single building can hold, and they are gatherings rather than sites. Both are worth knowing about, because a pilgrim who arrives in the wrong week sees a quiet church and a pilgrim who arrives in the right week sees the Ethiopian church as it understands itself.

Kulubi Gabriel

The church of St Gabriel at Kulubi stands on a hill in eastern Ethiopia, on the road that runs from Addis Ababa towards Harar and Dire Dawa. Its principal feast falls in late December, and a second falls in July. Pilgrims walk the last stretch uphill, many of them barefoot, and a great many come to fulfil vows made in illness or in trouble, bringing children to be baptised or blessed at the shrine and carrying gifts promised beforehand. The crowds are very large, and the roads towards it fill for days.

Petitionary vow-keeping of this kind is a recognisable Christian practice, and it also appears at Marian shrines in Europe and Latin America. The Church's caution is the same everywhere. A vow is a promise made to God, and keeping it is an act of religion. Devotion becomes disordered when the shrine, the water or the walk is treated as the cause of the favour rather than as the setting of a prayer.

Timkat

Timkat is the Ethiopian celebration of the baptism of Christ in the Jordan, kept on 19 January in most years and on 20 January in the year before a Gregorian leap year. On the eve, the tabot of each church is wrapped in rich cloth, carried out on the head of a priest and processed to a body of water, where it rests overnight under vigil. In the morning the water is blessed and the crowd is sprinkled or immersed, renewing baptism. The tabots are then carried home in procession with drums, sistra, chanting and dancing clergy.

Gondar, the seventeenth-century imperial capital in the north west, is where Timkat is most spectacular, because the ceremony takes place at the stone bath of Emperor Fasilides, a walled reservoir that is filled for the feast and into which the crowd descends. Addis Ababa, Lalibela and Axum all keep the feast on a large scale as well. UNESCO inscribed Timkat on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2019.

The 2019 inscription of Timkat on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity is published by UNESCO.

7. Namugongo and the Uganda Martyrs

Namugongo, on the edge of Kampala, is the destination of a very large annual Christian pilgrimage, and the crowd that gathers there fills an open-air site because no building could hold it. On 3 June 1886 a group of young men of the court of Kabaka Mwanga II of Buganda were burned there for refusing to renounce their baptism, and the anniversary is kept every year on that date by Catholics and Anglicans on adjacent ground.

The persecution ran from 1885 to 1887 and its victims were converts of both missions, Catholic converts made by the White Fathers and Anglican converts made by the Church Missionary Society. Forty-five martyrs are commemorated between the two churches. Twenty-two of them, the Catholic group, were beatified by Pope Benedict XV in 1920 and canonised by Pope Paul VI on 18 October 1964, during the Second Vatican Council. Charles Lwanga, the master of the royal pages, is named first among them, and Kizito, killed at about fourteen, is the youngest. The Anglican martyrs are honoured by the Church of Uganda with their own commemoration and their own shrine.

The canonisation of the twenty-two Ugandan martyrs by Pope Paul VI on 18 October 1964 is recorded in the acts of the Holy See. The Anglican martyrs of the same persecution are commemorated by the Church of Uganda, which maintains the Anglican shrine at Namugongo. The figure of forty-five martyrs commemorated between the two churches is the count used by the two shrines at Namugongo.

The two shrines

The Catholic basilica at Namugongo stands over the place of the burning. It was built in the shape of a traditional African hut in copper and concrete, with the roof carried on external supports that meet in a peak, and it was completed in the mid 1970s. Below and around it lies a large open-air site with a lake and an altar platform where the great Mass of 3 June is celebrated for a crowd far too big for any building. The Anglican shrine stands nearby, marking the martyrdom of the Anglican converts, and the two communities keep the day side by side.

Three popes have come. Paul VI visited Uganda in 1969, the first journey of a reigning pope to sub-Saharan Africa, and consecrated the site of the shrine. John Paul II came in 1993 and Francis in 2015, and Francis prayed at both the Catholic and the Anglican shrines on the same visit.

The walk

What makes Namugongo unlike a European shrine is how people arrive. Parish groups leave on foot weeks in advance from every part of Uganda and from Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan, some walking several hundred kilometres, sleeping in parishes and schools along the way, praying the rosary and singing as they go. Some carry crosses. The walk is understood as the pilgrimage, and the arrival on 3 June is its end rather than its purpose.

The Church's own account of what happened at Namugongo is theological before it is political. Martyrdom is the supreme witness given to the truth of the faith, borne even unto death (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2473). The Ugandan martyrs were nearly all young, most were servants of the court, and several were killed specifically for refusing sexual demands of the king. That detail is part of the record and the Church has never hidden it, because the martyrs died over the ordinary integrity of a baptised life rather than over an abstraction. For the wider Catholic understanding of the saints and their intercession, see our guide to the saints.

8. Munyonyo and the Rest of the Martyrs' Trail

Munyonyo, on the shore of Lake Victoria south of Kampala, is where the persecution began. It was a royal residence of Kabaka Mwanga, and it was there that he passed sentence on the Christians of his court. St Denis Ssebuggwawo was killed there on 25 May 1886, and St Andrew Kaggwa, the leader of the royal band, on 26 May, the first of the group to die. The condemned who survived that day were marched from Munyonyo towards Namugongo, a journey of some kilometres that ended in the fire of 3 June.

A large shrine church was built at Munyonyo and dedicated in the mid 2010s, and Pope Francis prayed there in November 2015 on the visit that also took him to Namugongo. Pilgrims increasingly do the two sites in order, beginning at Munyonyo with the sentence and walking towards Namugongo with the execution, which restores the shape of the story.

Other stations on the trail

A number of smaller sites are attached to the same history and are visited by Ugandan parishes.

• Kigungu, on the lakeshore near Entebbe, marks the landing point of the first Catholic missionaries in Buganda, the White Fathers Simeon Lourdel, known locally as Mapeera, and Brother Amans Delmas, in February 1879. A small church and a monument stand there.
• Rubaga, one of the hills of Kampala, carries the cathedral of the Archdiocese of Kampala and the tomb of Mapeera, and is a normal stop for pilgrims working through the story.
• Namugongo itself holds a museum and a series of stations set out around the lake within the shrine grounds, used for the way of the cross by groups who arrive early.
• Parish churches along the walking routes function as stations in practice, since the walking groups stop, sleep and pray at them, and many of them mark the passage with their own liturgies.

The Uganda Martyrs are also the reason the Church in East Africa has an unusually strong culture of youth pilgrimage. The martyrs were young, most of them under thirty and some of them children, and Ugandan and Kenyan parishes send young people to Namugongo in organised walking groups every year as a matter of course.

9. Kibeho in Rwanda

Kibeho, in southern Rwanda, carries a named episcopal decree, and the shrine itself and Rwandan Church sources describe it as the only Marian apparition site in Africa with recognition of that kind. From 28 November 1981, students at Kibeho College reported appearances of a figure who identified herself as Nyina wa Jambo, Mother of the Word. Visions were reported over several years by a number of students, and the Church's judgment covers three of them: Alphonsine Mumureke, Nathalie Mukamazimpaka and Marie Claire Mukangango.

Bishop Augustin Misago of Gikongoro issued the declaration on 29 June 2001, approving the public cult of Our Lady of Sorrows at Kibeho and recognising the authenticity of the apparitions to those three seers. The decree was explicit that it did not extend to the many other people who had claimed visions at Kibeho. A shrine church stands at the site and pilgrims come from Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and further afield, with the largest gathering around the anniversary at the end of November.

Some of the reported visions included scenes of violence and of bodies, and it is very common to see these presented as a prophecy of the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, in which Marie Claire Mukangango was among those killed. The bishop's declaration makes no such finding, and this page will not make one either. What is documented is the content of the reported visions, the date and terms of the approval, and the fact that the association with 1994 is a widespread popular interpretation rather than a Church judgment. Our full guide to the approved apparitions at Kibeho in Rwanda sets out the decree in detail.

Rwanda also carries genocide memorial sites in and around churches, including places where people were killed in the buildings where they had taken refuge. Those are memorials rather than shrines, they are administered by the state, and they are governed by strict rules of conduct. Pilgrims who include them do so as an act of mourning and repentance, and should follow the guidance of the Rwandan Church and the memorial authorities rather than treating them as items on an itinerary.

10. Tagaste, Hippo Regius and Carthage

Roman North Africa produced the theology the Western Church still runs on. Tertullian and Cyprian wrote at Carthage, Perpetua and Felicity died in its amphitheatre, and Augustine of Hippo, whose work stands behind almost every later Western argument about grace, sin, time and the Church, was born, converted, ordained and buried in what is now eastern Algeria. These sites are ruins with small living Christian communities around them, and visiting them is a different act from visiting Lourdes.

Tagaste

Tagaste, the modern Souk Ahras in north eastern Algeria, is where Augustine was born in 354 and where his mother Monica was born and lived. He taught there in his twenties, and it is the town of the early books of the Confessions. Little of the Roman town is visible, and the pilgrimage is essentially an act of standing in the landscape of a text. Our guides to St Augustine of Hippo and to St Monica cover the two lives in full.

Hippo Regius

Hippo Regius, on the coast at modern Annaba, is where Augustine was ordained priest and then made bishop in 395, and where he served until his death on 28 August 430 while the Vandals were besieging the city. The archaeological site holds streets, cisterns, houses and the mosaic pavements of a large basilica generally identified with his church. Above the ruins, on the hill, stands the Basilica of St Augustine, built in the late nineteenth century on the initiative of Cardinal Charles Lavigerie, Archbishop of Algiers and founder of the White Fathers. It holds a relic of Augustine's arm, sent from Pavia, where the bulk of his relics rest in San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro. Monica died at Ostia in 387 while waiting for a ship back to Africa, and her relics are in Rome, at Sant'Agostino.

Carthage

Carthage, now a suburb of Tunis, was the metropolitan see of Latin Africa and the setting of some of the earliest and most vivid Christian documents in existence. On 7 March 203, under Septimius Severus, a young mother named Vibia Perpetua and a slave woman named Felicity were killed in the amphitheatre with their companions, and the account of their imprisonment survives partly in Perpetua's own words, one of the earliest texts written by a Christian woman. Our guide to Saints Perpetua and Felicity covers the passion and the text. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, was beheaded in 258 in the persecution under Valerian.

Visitors today see the Byrsa hill, the amphitheatre where the martyrs died, the excavated Christian basilicas including the large complex at Damous el Karita, and the nineteenth-century cathedral on the hill, built under the French protectorate and now deconsecrated and used as a cultural venue. King Louis IX of France died at Carthage in 1270 on the Eighth Crusade, which is why the hill carried his name for a century; our guide to the Crusades covers that expedition.

Tertullian, writing at Carthage, gave the Church the sentence that this whole coastline illustrates: the blood of the Christians is seed. The African church of the second to the fifth century was large, articulate and combative, and it was eventually reduced to almost nothing. A pilgrim standing in the ruins of Hippo is standing in a place where the Church was once at its strongest and later almost vanished, which is a sobering thing to have in a Christian itinerary and a healthy one.

11. Tipasa and the Ruined Basilicas of the Coast

Tipasa, on the Algerian coast west of Algiers, holds an extensive and well preserved early Christian complex. The Roman town was a trading settlement that became a Christian centre, and its remains include several basilicas, a large Christian cemetery and the church associated with St Salsa, a young martyr of the site, on the eastern hill. UNESCO inscribed Tipasa on the World Heritage List in 1982.

The World Heritage inscription of Tipasa in 1982 is published by UNESCO in its World Heritage List.

What Tipasa gives a pilgrim is scale. The basilicas are large, the cemeteries are dense, and the impression is of an ordinary provincial Christianity that filled a town rather than a scattering of house churches. The same impression is available at other Algerian and Tunisian sites, Djemila and Timgad among them, where basilicas and baptisteries stand in the middle of well-preserved Roman street plans. The North African baptisteries in particular, deep sunken fonts with steps down and up, show what fourth-century initiation looked like as an architectural fact, and they are worth seeing for anyone who wants to understand baptism in the early Church.

These are archaeological parks under state administration. There is no resident community and no liturgy, and access is governed by the national heritage authorities. A pilgrim visits them the way a reader visits a manuscript, and the prayer happens at the parishes of the living Catholic community in Algeria, which is small, largely made up of sub-Saharan African students and workers along with religious communities, and which serves under the Archdiocese of Algiers and the dioceses of Oran, Constantine and Laghouat.

12. Our Lady of Africa in Algiers

Notre-Dame d'Afrique, Our Lady of Africa, stands on a cliff above the bay of Algiers, north of the Bab el Oued quarter. The basilica was begun in 1858 on the initiative of Bishop Louis Pavy and consecrated in 1872, in a Byzantine and Moorish style with a silver dome, and it holds a dark-coloured statue of the Virgin above the high altar. It was restored in a long programme of works completed at the end of 2010.

The inscription in the apse, set behind the altar, is the reason the church is famous beyond Algeria. It reads: Notre Dame d'Afrique priez pour nous et pour les Musulmans. Our Lady of Africa, pray for us and for the Muslims. The petition has been there since the nineteenth century, and it states the posture of the Catholic Church in the Maghreb as clearly as any document. The Church there is a small minority, it does not proselytise, and it prays for its neighbours by name.

The basilica is a working shrine and a place of prayer for Christians of many nations resident in Algiers, and it also receives Muslim visitors who come to pray for their own intentions, a practice the Church there has accepted for generations. The site sits above the Christian cemetery of Saint-Eugène, and the view across the bay is the reason many pilgrims remember it.

For a Catholic from Europe or the Americas, Our Lady of Africa is a corrective. Christianity in North Africa today is a minority faith practised quietly under conditions that would be unrecognisable to a Western parish, and its shrines are not crowded. Praying in an almost empty basilica among people who are a very small minority in their own society changes the meaning of the word pilgrimage.

13. Tibhirine and the Martyrs of Algeria

Tibhirine is a Trappist monastery in the Atlas mountains near Medea, south of Algiers, called Notre-Dame de l'Atlas. Its community lived alongside a Muslim village, ran a clinic, worked a garden with their neighbours and stayed through the Algerian civil war of the 1990s after long discussion about whether to leave. Seven of the monks were taken from the house in March 1996, and their deaths were announced in May of that year.

The prior, Christian de Chergé, had written a testament to be opened in the event of his death. In it he asked that his country and his killer not be condemned on his account, addressed his eventual murderer as a friend of the last moment, and said that he wished to be able to see the children of Islam as God sees them. The text has been published and translated widely, and it is read aloud at the monastery by visitors who come to pray there.

On 8 December 2018, at Oran, the seven monks of Tibhirine were beatified together with twelve other religious and Bishop Pierre Claverie of Oran, nineteen in all, killed in Algeria between 1994 and 1996. The beatification was celebrated in Algeria itself, with Algerian Muslim officials present, and the Church was careful in the liturgy to remember alongside them the very large number of Algerian Muslims killed in the same years.

The beatification of Bishop Pierre Claverie and eighteen companions took place at the shrine of Santa Cruz, Oran, on 8 December 2018. The decrees and the date are published by the Holy See.

The monastery buildings at Tibhirine remain, cared for by a small presence, and the graves of the monks are in the cemetery on the site. Visits are possible and are arranged through the Church in Algeria rather than independently, and pilgrims go quietly and in small numbers. The shrine of Santa Cruz at Oran, above the city, is the second site of this story and the place of the beatification.

Tibhirine matters to the argument of this whole page. African Christian pilgrimage is dominated by martyrs, and the martyrs are recent. Namugongo is from the 1880s. The nineteen of Algeria died in the 1990s. Rwandan Catholics who pray at Kibeho remember 1994. The African Church is not visiting its martyrs at a safe historical distance, and its pilgrimages carry a weight that is easy to miss from outside.

14. Ngome, Popenguine and Subukia

Three national and diocesan Marian shrines carry most of the Marian pilgrimage traffic in sub-Saharan Africa outside Kibeho. Each is a working shrine with an annual pilgrimage day, and each has a different standing in Church law, which is worth stating precisely.

Ngome, South Africa

Ngome lies in northern KwaZulu-Natal, in the Diocese of Eshowe, in hill country near Nongoma. Between 1955 and 1971 a German Benedictine missionary sister, Reinolda May, reported appearances of the Virgin under the title Tabernacle of the Most High, at a place where seven springs rise. The diocesan bishop permitted public devotion at the site, and Ngome functions today as a shrine of the diocese with regular pilgrimages, particularly around the feast of the Assumption in August. No declaration has been made that the reported apparitions are of supernatural origin. Permission for public devotion is a separate act from any judgment on origin, and under the 2024 norms described above the Church ordinarily makes no declaration of supernatural origin at all. Pilgrims collect water from the springs, and the same caution applies as at any shrine with a spring: the water is a sign, and it works no effect of itself.

Popenguine, Senegal

Popenguine is a coastal village south of Dakar with a stone church of Notre-Dame de la Délivrance, built in the late nineteenth century by the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, holding a dark statue of the Virgin. Its pilgrimage falls on Pentecost Monday, when large numbers of Senegalese Catholics, above all young people, walk from Dakar and from parishes across the country and camp around the church. Senegal is an overwhelmingly Muslim country with a small Catholic minority, and the Popenguine pilgrimage is the great annual visible expression of that minority's life. Relations between the two communities in Senegal are famously good, and Muslim families along the walking route have long provided water and shelter to the pilgrims.

Subukia, Kenya

Subukia lies in the Rift Valley in Nakuru County, and the Kenyan bishops established it as the national Marian shrine, known as the Village of Mary Mother of God. The site is set on the rim of a valley with a spring below, reached by a long descent, and the annual national pilgrimage brings pilgrims from across Kenya. Its foundation belongs to the 1980s and it grew out of the Catholic revival around the international Eucharistic congress held in Nairobi in 1985. Kenyan parishes use it for diocesan and youth pilgrimages through the year, and it functions as the Kenyan Church's national gathering place in the way Knock functions in Ireland.

Marian devotion is central to African Catholicism, and shrines of this kind multiply. The test the Church applies to any of them is set out in our guide to Marian apparition sites, and the short version is that permission for devotion is not the same as a judgment that anything supernatural occurred, and that no shrine, image or spring can be presented as producing an effect of itself.

15. Yamoussoukro and Our Lady of Peace

The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace stands at Yamoussoukro, the political capital of Côte d'Ivoire, built between 1985 and 1989 at the direction of President Félix Houphouët-Boigny in his home town, and consecrated by Pope John Paul II on 10 September 1990. Its dome and colonnaded esplanade were modelled on St Peter's in Rome, its stained glass covers a very large area and includes a window in which the president is depicted among those adoring Christ, and it stands in a town of modest size surrounded by open ground.

Guinness World Records lists it as the largest church in the world by total area, a measure that includes the esplanade and the rectory. St Peter's Basilica in Rome holds more people inside its walls, and this page keeps that distinction rather than repeating the shorter and less accurate claim.

The description of the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace as the largest church in the world by total area is published by Guinness World Records. Comparisons with St Peter's Basilica depend on whether interior floor area or total site area is being measured.

The basilica has been controversial since the day it was announced, and the controversy is part of what a pilgrim should know. Critics inside and outside the Church argued that the cost was indefensible in a country with pressing needs, and that the building served a president's legacy. Pope John Paul II accepted the consecration on the understanding that a hospital would be built beside the basilica, and the long delay in building that hospital became the standing criticism of the whole project.

What is also true is that the building is now a Catholic shrine used by Ivorian Catholics, staffed by a religious community, and a place of pilgrimage in West Africa in its own right. The argument about how it came to exist and the fact that people pray in it are both real, and a guide that reports one without the other is not being straight with the reader.

16. The Ghanaian Castle Chapels as Sites of Memory

Along the coast of Ghana stand the forts and castles of the Atlantic slave trade, of which Elmina and Cape Coast are the best known. Elmina, built by the Portuguese in 1482 as São Jorge da Mina and taken by the Dutch in 1637, and Cape Coast Castle, held for most of its working life by the English, both contain a Christian chapel and both contain dungeons in which captive Africans were held before shipment. At Cape Coast the church stood directly above the male dungeon. UNESCO inscribed the forts and castles of the Ghanaian coast on the World Heritage List in 1979.

The 1979 World Heritage inscription covers the forts and castles of the Volta, Greater Accra, Central and Western regions of Ghana, and is published by UNESCO in its World Heritage List.

No one should present these castles as shrines. They are places of memory, and Christians visit them because Christian worship was carried on in them while the trade was carried on beneath. That fact is documented in the buildings themselves, in the position of the chapel floors relative to the cells, and it is not a matter of interpretation. Pilgrims who go there go to face what baptised people did, and to pray in repentance.

The Catholic Church has spoken about this history repeatedly. Pope John Paul II prayed at the House of Slaves on Gorée Island off Dakar in February 1992 and asked forgiveness for the part played by Christians in the enslavement of Africans. Popes since have repeated the plea in other settings. The Ghanaian castles serve the same purpose for a visitor: to make the abstraction concrete and to keep the memory in the Church rather than outside it.

A visit of this kind belongs in an African pilgrimage for a reason that is theological. Pilgrimage in the Christian tradition has always included penitential travel, journeys undertaken for sin rather than for consolation. The castle chapels give a contemporary form to that older practice, and a pilgrim who has stood in the dungeon at Cape Coast and then read the Confiteor understands both of them differently.

17. Planning an African Pilgrimage

An African pilgrimage is planned around a feast and a local church rather than around a route. The sites in this guide lie thousands of kilometres apart, they belong to different countries and different churches, and no sensible itinerary joins Lalibela to Yamoussoukro. Choose one road from section two and go properly.

Go with the local church

The single most useful principle is to travel with the church that owns the site. Ugandan dioceses organise the walk to Namugongo. The Church in Algeria arranges access to Tibhirine. Ethiopian parishes and monasteries receive pilgrims by their own arrangements, and a Catholic group will normally be hosted through the Ethiopian Catholic Church. This produces a better pilgrimage than any commercial arrangement, and it also means the money stays with the community that keeps the place.

Seasons and rhythms

The feast decides the season more than the weather does. Ethiopian pilgrimage clusters in January around Genna and Timkat, which falls in the dry months of the highlands, and again at Axum in late November. The Ugandan pilgrimage is fixed to 3 June. Popenguine falls on Pentecost Monday and therefore moves with Easter. Kibeho gathers at the end of November. North African sites have no season, because they have no crowds, and a pilgrim there is choosing the weather rather than the feast.

Conduct at other churches' sites

At Ethiopian Orthodox churches, remove shoes at the door, dress modestly with shoulders and knees covered, and expect long standing services with no seating. Ask before photographing a priest, a tabot or a manuscript, and accept a refusal. Several monasteries admit men only, and that rule is not negotiable and should be checked before a group sets out. Fasting seasons in the Ethiopian church are long and strict, and a guest who keeps them for the days of the visit will be understood immediately.

At the archaeological sites

Hippo, Carthage and Tipasa are ruins under state control with no liturgy. Bring the text you have come for, whether the Confessions, the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity or a letter of Cyprian, and read it on the ground. That is the whole practice at these places, and it works far better than a guided commentary.

What we deliberately do not tell you

This guide carries no prices, no opening hours, no timetables, no operator names and no visa or entry requirements. All of those change, several of them change quickly, and a page that published them would be giving you stale information within a year. Check current conditions with the relevant diocese, the national bishops' conference, and your own government's travel guidance before committing to anything.

If you cannot travel

Most people reading this will never stand at Lalibela or walk to Namugongo, and the Church has never taught that physical travel is required of anyone. The martyrs are venerated in every parish that keeps their feast, and 3 June is in the general calendar of the Latin Church, so the Uganda Martyrs are commemorated at Mass worldwide on the day the crowds are gathering at Namugongo. Our guides to making a virtual pilgrimage and to Christian pilgrimage sites worldwide set out how the interior journey is made without the flight.

The test after any pilgrimage is the ordinary one. Do you pray more than before. Do you read Scripture more. Are you more patient with the people you live with. A journey that produces those things has done its work, and one that produces only photographs has been a good holiday.