The lines
Migingo is less than a third the size of Benfica’s pitch. The stage is big enough to host “Africa’s smallest war” for decades.
Somewhere in Lake Victoria, over Kenyan waters and close to the border with Uganda, almost as if placed there by a giant, sits a small rock. From a distance, it doesn’t even look like a geological formation, largely due to the cheap steel that covers it from one end to the other.
On one of the most densely populated islands in the world and one of the most densely populated places on the planet, there are bars, hotels, a pharmacy, barbers, brothels, a mosque (although most of the places are Christian). But there is no running water, sewers or Wi-Fi.
A Migingo island It is only 2000 square meters. It’s less than a third of the pitch at SL Benfica’s Estádio da Luz. In this small space, the size of little more than three large areas, around 500 peopleaccording to several sources, despite the last census, in 2016, showing only 131 inhabitants. Some sources even say there are around a thousand inhabitants of the island.
It’s curious if we think that anyone looking around Migingo will easily find other islands, much more spacious and practically empty, like Usingo. There is a poetic explanation and another more rational one, which is that the “gold” is in Migingo.
Locals say that many believe that evil spirits hover over the neighboring lands, those of those who were once banished from Migingo, and that is why the surrounding islands are empty of flesh and blood bodies. But the truth is that Migingo is the “rich island”, where the fish are closest. Staying in Migingo means, for most, less spent on fuel and more profit.
There is no official means of transport to get to the island, according to the influencer Kieran Brownwho posted it recently and showed it to tens of thousands of followers in August. To be able to go to Migingo, Brown had to leave Kisumu and take a van to Karungu — a journey that was supposed to take less than three hours, but took seven. Afterwards, the traveler went on a boat and had to go through a kind of border control, on the island next to Migingo, before finally arriving at the crowded rock.
In Migingo, Brown slept for just a dollar a night, in a small shelter made of corrugated metal, the steel that seems to make up all the human constructions on the island. He spent the night with local “security guards” in the next room, who he had previously hired for around 25,500 Kenyan shillings (170 euros), to always be with him during his visit to the island.
The “smallest war in Africa”
Land of fishermen, the island has been the scene of territorial disputes between Kenyans and Ugandans for decades, mainly over fishing rights for the valuable Nile perch.
The attentive eyes of some Kenyan fishermen, lulled by the drop in the lake’s water levels, noticed the abundant “gold” in the waters around the rock (the daily catches of fish can be worth 6800 euros, this year has advanced) and they made the fishing station their home in the 1990s.
Today, the tension between the two countries in the area is often described as the “smallest war in Africa”, as classified in 2019 by .
It will be 100 years next year since colonial borders defined the small island It belongs to Kenya, but Uganda has claimed the tiny rock since 2004. It is said that he does so because of the fish business and that the demand has since developed into a patriotic issue.
In 2004, Ugandan authorities sent maritime police and marines to the island, raised the Ugandan flag and began charging taxes to fishermen to supposedly offer them protection against local pirates, Al Jazeera reported in 2019.
O timing Kampala’s main motivation was to control the Nile perch business in the most profitable area of Lake Victoria, but the lake’s border line, poorly demarcated since the colonial era, opened the way for Ugandans to say that the island (or at least the waters around it) were Ugandan and to act as if they had jurisdiction over the area.
From then on, conflicts became increasingly frequent. Kenyan fishermen begin to complain about harassment, confiscation of fish and from requirement for Ugandan licensesthe Institute for African Security Studies (ISS Africa). Nairobi chose to react politically and sent authorities to the scene.
It was only in 2009 that a joint demarcation exercise confirmed that Migingo itself is on the Kenyan side, but nothing was 100% resolved: Uganda insists that a large part of the surrounding waters is its own, which has served as a pretext for maintaining the presence of authorities and controlling fishing there.
The conflict, to date, has not escalated into greater evil, and manifests itself in isolated incidents, namely in the form of frequent harassment. A Ugandan trader was found dead near the island in July 2020, in a case investigated as a homicide. In 2021, Ugandan police mentioned that some individuals were spreading false information to local radio stations that around 42 people had been killed, but denied the allegations.
A memorandum of understanding between Kenya and Uganda aims to implement joint fishing licenses later this year to ease tensions on the small, crowded rock.
Tomás Guimarães, ZAP //
