A round rock crammed with corrugated metal shacks rises out of Lake Victoria right at the border between Kenya and Uganda. The deep waters that surround it are rich with fish.
Migingo Island covers less than half a football pitch but more than 500 people, according to the Ugandan police, live in less than 2,000 square metres area.
The rock island, with its poorly constructed huts, a tiny port, some bars, a brothel and an open-air casino, is heavily contested by Kenya and Uganda that both claim ownership.
Migingo was little more than a rock jutting out of the water before the lake started receding in the early 1990s, according to Emmanuel Kisiangani, a senior researcher at the Pretoria office of the Institute for Security Studies.
Fish catches have hugely diminished over the years in the fishing communities around Lake Victoria because of overfishing and an invasion of water hyacinth plants that
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