On 28 November 1981, at a Catholic girls' school in the southern hill town of Kibeho, a student named Alphonsine Mumureke reported that the Virgin Mary had appeared to her as Nyina wa Jambo, Mother of the Word. Two schoolmates, Nathalie Mukamazimpaka and Marie Claire Mukangango, soon reported visions of their own, and crowds gathered to watch the girls fall into long ecstasies. What set Kibeho apart from the era's many reported apparitions was the darkness of its content.
On 15 August 1982 the visionaries wept through visions of rivers of blood, people killing one another, corpses left unburied and trees in flame, imagery that Rwandans would read very differently after 1994. Kibeho itself became a site of massacre twice over, during the genocide and again in 1995 when soldiers fired on a camp of displaced people beside the shrine.
In 2001 the local bishop, with Rome's assent, declared the apparitions to the first three visionaries worthy of belief, making Kibeho the first Vatican approved Marian apparition site in Africa. The shrine of Our Lady of Sorrows now draws pilgrims from across the continent, and its approved messages, calls to repentance, prayer and honest mourning, are woven into Rwanda's own work of remembering what the visionaries seemed to see coming.