Martyrs in Africa

The Martyrs in Africa are a company of martyrs of Masyla in North Africa, commemorated on April 9. Their individual names and a detailed account of their suffering are not preserved; the commemoration survives chiefly through the liturgical calendar, which retains the memory of the company while transmitting little of its particulars.

They belong to the broad class of partly-anonymous North African martyr companies of the early centuries, whose collective witness was honored in the African church and whose memory passed into the wider synaxarion. Saint Augustine of Hippo is recorded to have preached on the feast of these martyrs, a notice that anchors the commemoration in the liturgical life of North Africa even though the surviving record preserves few further details.