Bukavu buries 26 pupils after Ujamaa school fire and stampede

Families in Bukavu stood on Monday around rows of coffins after a fire and stampede at Ujamaa Primary School. UNICEF said 26 children died and 25 were injured. Some local counts on Monday spoke of 28 coffins, 26 pupils and two teachers. An earlier M23 figure was 24 dead, 19 girls and five boys. French-language reports of the burial named 20 girls and six boys among the children. The differences are what a city produces when the school, the morgue and the armed administration each keep their own list.

The fire started about 9 a.m. local time on Thursday, 11 September, in the Chimpunda neighbourhood of Kadutu commune, a dense slope of wooden houses above Lake Kivu. Flames moved through the timber school. Some children jumped from upper floors. Others ran for the doors and were crushed. Inspectors from the national education ministry, working from Kinshasa's side of a divided state, wrote that some pupils died underfoot and others from smoke after the gate stayed shut. They also wrote that fire broke out at three points about 500 metres apart. Hundreds of homes burned. Local officials spoke of about 300 houses. At one point 21 patients were in intensive care.

Bukavu, capital of South Kivu, has been held by the Rwanda-backed AFC/M23 since February 2025. The movement declared three days of mourning on Friday. Kinshasa and the M23 administration both said they would investigate. No public finding has named a cause. Wooden hillside housing in Bukavu burns often. Three ignition points 500 metres apart is the detail that keeps the file from being filed as a kitchen accident. It is also only an inspectors' note until someone tests it.

Monday's ceremony mixed photographs of the dead with the presence of M23 officials who now run the city. Parents carried the pictures. The armed group carried the timetable: three days of mourning, then burial, then the next security meeting. The school itself is a black frame. The gate that did not open in time is part of the testimony. Whether that gate was locked as policy or jammed in the rush is one of the questions the two investigations will have to answer if they are real.

Eastern Congo's war did not light the classrooms. It did decide who speaks at the funeral and which flag hangs over the graves. UNICEF's numbers are the ones most likely to travel. The ministry's three-point map is the one most likely to matter if anyone still wants a cause. For the families the cause is already the closed gate and the wooden walls. Twenty-six children went to lessons at 9 a.m. They did not come home.