A primary school in southern Mozambican port city of Beira has been transformed into a makeshift shelter for a few dozen families that saw their homes destroyed by the last week’s Cyclone Idai.One young mother, Mimi Manuel, 26, sat on the floor with her four children, the youngest just one year old.

Families were cooking food using wood chopped from trees ripped from the ground by the storm, as toddlers played around battered school desks. The families come from the nearby community of Praia Nova, which hugs the sea from where the cyclone came.Steel-sheet roofs were blown off and walls of rough cement and loose bricks collapsed on people who had been told to stay inside by the authorities.

At the city’s central morgue, Mika Masseera, 56, mourned the death of his mother. Sumbo Mufucho, 73, died after clinging to a tree for two days as floodwater surrounded her. She was rescued and taken to hospital but died soon afterwards. On Saturday her closest family lifted her coffin on to an open-top white truck and drove to one of the city’s cemetery.

The number of people killed in Mozambique after a cyclone tore through southern Africa and triggered devastating floods has risen to more than 400, a government minister said on Saturday, as the United Nations warned of the risk of further flooding.