Pope Francis has begun a three-day trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he is expected to say Mass for hundreds of thousands of people, before he travels on to South Sudan.
He landed on Tuesday afternoon in Kinshasha, the capital of the DRC where a public holiday was declared to mark his arrival. On Wednesday, he will lead Mass at the airport.
Francis is the first pope to visit the DRC in nearly 40 years. The country has a population of roughly 100 million people, nearly half of whom are Catholics.
On Monday, he asked his followers in a tweet to “accompany this journey with their prayers”.