In 1982, three schoolgirls in Rwanda began to weep and scream in front of tens of thousands of people. They said they were watching their country fill with blood. Twelve years later, it did.

It began on the twenty-eighth of November 1981, in the dining hall of a girls' school in Kibeho, in southern Rwanda. A sixteen-year-old student named Alphonsine Mumureke collapsed and said a woman was speaking to her, a woman who called herself Nyina wa Jambo. Mother of the Word. The other students laughed. One girl, Marie Claire Mukangango, mocked her hardest of all. Then Marie Claire began to see the woman too. So did a third student, Nathalie Mukamazimpaka. Soon thousands were climbing the hills to watch.

This was not a quiet vision. The girls fell into trances that lasted for hours. Doctors and a Church commission tested them, pricking them with needles and shining lights in their eyes, and the girls did not flinch. The woman, they said, always named the date she would return.

Then came the fifteenth of August 1982, the Feast of the Assumption. Tens of thousands were watching. This time the visions were not gentle. The woman wept, and the girls wept with her, and then they began to scream. They described a river of blood. People killing people. Bodies without heads. A country torn open. They were begging it to stop.

Twelve years later, in 1994, Rwanda fell into a genocide that killed around eight hundred thousand people in a hundred days. Neighbours killed neighbours. The rivers carried the dead. Marie Claire, one of the three girls, was murdered along with her husband. The church at Kibeho itself became a place of massacre.

In 2001, after twenty years of investigation by its own medical and theological commissions, the Catholic Church declared the visions of the three girls authentic. The first it has ever approved anywhere in Africa. Believers say Heaven sent a warning that a nation ignored. Skeptics say frightened children sensed the hatred already in the air around them. The visions are on the record. So is the genocide. The shrine still stands at Kibeho. You can go and see it.

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