Earth, wood and grass
Sun-dried mud bricks laid in mud mortar and plastered with mud, the way Kassena houses were built. About 60 metres long and 14 wide.
Ghana-Net.com · Upper East Region · Navrongo
Sixty metres of sun-dried mud brick, built in 1920 by French missionaries and Kassena masons, painted inside in 1972 by seven women from Sirigu, and nearly lost when its tower began to fail. It is the last great mud-brick church in Ghana, a minor basilica since 2006, and the mother church of Catholic northern Ghana. Its sister church in Bolgatanga is the diocese's co-cathedral. This is the honest story of both.
On 23 April 1906, three members of the Society of Missionaries of Africa, known as the White Fathers after their white robes, reached Navrongo: Father Oscar Morin, Father Chollet and Brother Eugene. They had travelled thirty-three days on horseback. They were French-speaking Catholics arriving in a British-run territory, the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, far from the Protestant missions of the south.
They built four mud huts, and on 1 May 1906 celebrated the first Mass in one of them. A small chapel followed in 1907. On 6 February 1910 a bell rang to open a larger community chapel.
They arrived into catastrophe. The cathedral's own history records that 1915 was the worst year of famine, when half the district's population died, and that the 1918 influenza epidemic killed about 10,000 more. The Fathers treated the sick, and that, more than preaching, is how they won people's trust. The Kassena and Nankani religion they came to replace is still practised in the district, at shrines like the crocodile ponds of Paga.
Permission for a proper church came on 5 September 1919, paid for by the Vatican and by donations from Europe, Canada and America. Construction began on 10 January 1920 with six masons. On 15 August 1920, the Feast of the Assumption, the bell, hanging from a small wooden frame on the parapet wall, rang to call the first congregation in.
Sun-dried mud bricks laid in mud mortar and plastered with mud, the way Kassena houses were built. About 60 metres long and 14 wide.
The original flat roof, which let the rain do its damage, was replaced with a pitched roof.
The 13-metre tower was designed by Father Lucien Melançon and built in 1927. It became the building's weak point.
In 1934, when Navrongo was raised to an Apostolic Vicariate, the mud church became its cathedral: the mother church of the Catholic north. The Diocese of Navrongo followed in 1956, and on 30 May 1977 it was renamed the Diocese of Navrongo–Bolgatanga. On 17 May 2006, a hundred years after the first Mass, the Vatican made the church a minor basilica.
A European plan, an African building. The layout is a European basilica: a long nave, a chancel and a bell tower. The materials, the techniques and the hands were Kassena. The missionaries did not choose mud out of respect for local culture. They chose it because it was the only building material there was.
The interior was painted in 1972, for the coming consecration of Bishop Rudolph Akanlu, the first Ghanaian bishop of Navrongo, on the initiative of Monsignor Kizito Avereyire. The work was done by seven women from Sirigu, a Nankani village famous for its painted houses, using the red, black and white earth pigments and geometric patterns of their own homes.
Their names were written down, and they belong on this page: Akanvole Akasise, Adumpoka Akasise, Akansaare Akabange, Alobase Asika-Kugre, Asokiwine Apisigre, Atigesama Akurugu and Akurugo Akayire. Two art students, Joseph Abagre and Simon Apio, helped them.
What they painted: the Last Supper, a Bethlehem scene at the entrance, animals, and scenes of village life, in the style women use on the walls of their own compounds. It is one of the few places where Christian art in Ghana looks unmistakably northern Ghanaian. Sirigu is a Nankani village, not a Kassena one; the cathedral brought the two traditions together.
Mud needs care. Every rainy season washes plaster away, and cement repairs, used across the north since the colonial period, trap moisture and destroy mud walls from inside. By 1995 the bell tower was suspected of being close to collapse. The Ghana Museums and Monuments Board recommended taking it down and rebuilding it with the same materials and techniques.
The conservation programme ran from 1999 to 2004. It was funded and advised from outside: the Getty Grant Program, CRAterre-EAG (the French earth-architecture centre), the German Catholic agency Misereor and the French Embassy, working with the GMMB. It ended with the opening of a small cathedral museum in 2004.
Beside the mud basilica stands a large concrete church dedicated to St Joseph. Sources disagree on its dates and even its status, but it shows what the diocese wanted: a modern building. The mud cathedral survived because outside money and heritage experts made it worth keeping.
The Navrongo Catholic Cathedral has been on Ghana's UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List since 2000. More than a quarter of a century later, it has still not been nominated.
Most visitors, and most websites, do not realise that the diocese has two cathedrals. When the Diocese of Navrongo was renamed Navrongo–Bolgatanga on 30 May 1977, the Sacred Heart Church in Bolgatanga, the new regional capital, became its co-cathedral. The bishop's seat is shared between the two towns, about 26 kilometres apart.
The Bolgatanga parish was founded in February 1925 by the White Fathers, with a building permit following in 1926: a daughter of Navrongo, nineteen years younger.
The co-cathedral of the Diocese of Navrongo–Bolgatanga since the renaming of 1977. The diocese has been led by Bishop Alfred Agyenta since 2011.
In a bell wall in front of the Bolgatanga church hang three bells of different sizes, cast in Germany. Two are dated 1921 and one 1918; one is inscribed to the fallen. How they reached Bolgatanga is not documented anywhere we can find. We are investigating.
Navrongo lies on the main road between Bolgatanga and Paga on the Burkina Faso border. Tro-tros run between Bolga, Navrongo and Paga all day. From Tamale, go north to Bolga first.
It is a working church, so dress for church and do not wander in during Mass. Ask at the parish office or the small museum to be shown inside, and ask before you photograph the murals. We have no verified current fee; see our entrance fees list and ask on arrival.
Combine Navrongo with the Paga crocodile pond and Pikworo slave camp, then go on to the painted houses of Sirigu and, another day, the Tongo Hills and Tengzug.
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The Upper East up close, on our dedicated Paga site, and the other side of the Catholic story on CapeCoastCastleMuseum.com.
Our shorter guide to the mud cathedral, for travellers coming from Paga.
The spiritual way of the Paga people, the religion the missionaries came to replace and did not.
The slave camp at Nania, near Paga: the north's history before the missionaries came.
The Catholic sisters buried in the Cape Coast war cemetery, and how the Church forgot them.
The Board that listed Navrongo, and what it does and does not do for Ghana's heritage.
Navrongo Cathedral is the most beautiful church in Ghana, and it was built and painted by northern Ghanaians: Kassena masons in 1920, Nankani women in 1972. The missionaries brought the plan and the faith; they also came to replace a religion that is still alive a few kilometres away. When the tower started to fail, it was foreign heritage money, not the diocese, that paid to keep the mud church rather than replace it with concrete. It has been on UNESCO's tentative list for over twenty-five years with no nomination. Go, look at the walls, and remember the names of the women who painted them.
Verified: 28 September 2026. The 1906 arrival and names, the 1907 and 1910 chapels, the 1919–1920 construction dates, the 1925 roof, the 1927 tower, the 1915 famine and 1918 epidemic, the 1972 murals and the painters' names, and the 1995–2004 conservation follow Navrongo Cathedral: The Merge of Two Cultures (CRAterre-EAG). The dimensions follow the GMMB. The diocese dates, the 2006 basilica, the Sacred Heart Co-Cathedral and the current bishop follow GCatholic and the diocese's published history. The Bolgatanga parish date follows our own research, and the bells are our own observation; their origin is unproven. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.