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‪Nowadays, Catholic buildings are often mentioned in travel guides as remarkable places in African cities. In the missionary era, however, the construction of Christian infrastructures was more in response to prosaic imperatives than to aesthetic challenges. The buildings’ heritage value was considered secondary for missionaries primarily concerned with financial and proselytizing challenges. The White Fathers operating in Upper Volta and the Gold Coast thus integrated these places into their apostolic strategies to give visibility to their activities without burdening their budgets with excessive expenses. It is the subsequent appropriation of Catholic places by communities of the faithful that gave an identity content to religious buildings. Having become “geosymbols” of Christianity, several missionary infrastructures take on a symbolic and memorial value as the local Church seeks to define common spaces of belonging. This article relies on the cases of Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) and the Gold Coast (Ghana) to question the polysemous “heritage-building” of missionary infrastructures in colonial and postcolonial times.‪