Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

Mamã Muxima, the Mother of the Heart on the banks of the Kwanza

Muxima (Angola) (1599)

About 130 kilometers from Luanda, beside the wide Kwanza River, stands one of the oldest Marian shrines in sub-Saharan Africa. The Church of Our Lady of the Conception of Muxima was built around 1599, next to a Portuguese colonial fortress, on land the Portuguese had occupied a few years earlier. It is documented that it was declared a National Monument in 1924 and that since 1996 it has been on UNESCO's Tentative List as a possible World Heritage Site.

The name of the place keeps all the tenderness of this devotion. In the Kimbundu language, Muxima significa «corazón». Por eso el pueblo llama a la Virgen «Mamã Muxima», la Madre del Corazón, y cuenta que en su imagen María no lleva al Niño en brazos, sino que junta las manos sobre el regazo, como quien recoge y guarda dentro de sí las súplicas de sus hijos.

Here tradition and history are intertwined with caution. The foundation of a first hermitage around 1560 by Captain Paulo Días de Novais, arrived with Jesuit parents, belongs to the local tradition spread by devotional sources; it is not in the same detail in the general historical summaries. What is documented is that Muxima is today the main Marian sanctuary of Angola, to which thousands of pilgrims come every year, many of them after long walks, praying and carrying the rosary in their hand.

In Muxima, there is a deeply moving spiritual story, one that has been explored in several missionary articles: this place was once linked to the slave trade, and today it has become a sanctuary of reconciliation and hope. Where oppression once reigned, the descendants of those people come to ask the Mother of the Heart for a new history of freedom and mercy. The sanctuary houses votive offerings that bear witness to favors received, although there is no critical inventory or published canonical records of specific miracles.