Notre Dame d'Afrique
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Notre Dame de la Garde
During their colonization period in Algeria, the French built the Basilica Notre Dame d'Afrique in Algiers. Miraculously, the place still stands, and is still used as a place of worship for Catholic Algerians. The Church lies at the northern coastline of Algiers, and is thought to be a complement to the Notre Dame de la Garde across the Mediterranean in Marseilles.
Religion is a combination of tradition, architecture, geography and symbolism. And the French Catholics were susceptible to all of them when transferring their Catholicism to Algeria.
The statue of Mary in Notre Dame d'Afrique has fine Caucasian features, but is ebony black. The reasoning has to be that this metaphorically black Madonna would be a gateway into the rest of Africa at this point of entry, and act as an incentive for and a familiar guard over her new converts. It is also a clear indication that Algerian and French Catholics are two different peoples.
The positioning of the Basilica is also very important. As a new church, facing the hill-top Notre Dame de la Garde across the Mediterranean would give Notre Dame d'Afrique the support and the protection (and the prayers) from her mature brethren in Christ from across the sea.
Finally, the French modeled the Basilica after the Byzantine Eastern churches, which influenced the great domed mosques of the Ottoman period, who took their example from Constantinople's Hagia Sophia. Mosaics, also a feature borrowed by mosques from the Byzantines, figures both inside and outside Notre Dame d'Afrique. Thus this north African church, in the land of the Muslims, who wished to draw them into her interior, wouldn't be so strange and alien in her Islamic surroundings.
And what an interior, with the prayer: "Notre Dame d'Afrique pray for us and the Muslims" written across nave facing the alter. And what a difference from Constantinople's Hagia Sophia, which after being converted into a Mosque by the Ottomans, now bears Islamic calligraphy plates which cover Christian images.
God helped the French to build the perfect church in Notre Dame d'Afrique. The proof is that it she still standing and performing her rites.
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the Black Madonna and the inscription "Prier pour nous
et pour les Musulmans"
[Click images to see a larger versions]
To get more information on the French presence in Algeria, Gallia Watch covers it along with several posts on Sarkozy's trip to Algeria, and also mentions Notre Dame d'Afrique at this post.
