I do not know if I am Ugandan or Kenyan.
I was found, when I was not yet two months old, by Tanzanian fishermen on a buoy off Kisumu.
He says the mother was someone who probably shuttled between Kisumu, which is in Kenya, and Jinja, Uganda's main port.
‘Surely he is not Tanzanian,’ they thought and said of the infant I was, ‘because around here the malayas are all Ugandan or Kenyan.
After all, sons of bitches have no citizenship, let alone me who don't even have a mother.
Actually I feel more sorry for her, I could have been the only male to call her by her real name and not humiliate her for money.

So I grew up with them, the fishermen of Lake Victoria.
Poachers, because if it is true that Kenya's territorial waters are little more than a tenth of those of Uganda and Tanzania, it is equally certain that the best fish abounds right inside Kenyan borders.

It is the fishermen themselves who have to defend the fishermen, because the navy policemen who are sent to the border between the territorial waters do nothing but take good tips. The Tanzanians are happy, because the soldiers in Kisumu treat them better than the Ugandans, but the real battle is with the Ugandans themselves, to win the fishiest spot.

Ever since I was a child, I dreamed of having my own little boat.
Like the one I was born in, a wooden shell to mind my own business. I'm not Kenyan, Ugandan or Tanzanian anyway.
I am a son of a bitch, I fish where I like.
And I fish the best perch and the edible furu, because there are at least four thousand different species of furu. I know these things, I talk to the furu, because I was born in the middle of the lake, like them.

And the lake, the old Tanzanian fisherman Migingo, who was my father, told me, is not like the sea, where everything disperses.
The stories of the fish bounce back, even richer in detail and truth. The furu told me that they are among the oldest fish in the world, some species are 12 thousand years old; the Nile perch, on the other hand, was forcibly introduced into the lake fifty years ago, creating a revolution.
It adapts and reproduces easily, has no particular habits and no history behind it.

It eats all kinds of vegetables, but in doing so, it steals certain types from fish that can no longer find any, and slowly become extinct, or change their area, moving further and further into the unfathomable centre of the lake.

Working hard and ingratiating myself with the chief perch seller of Jinja, while still young, I made my own boat. Those who wanted the best fish had to come and find me.
One morning, while following the cold current favoured by the pink perch, I came across a small remote island, right on the border between Kenyan and Ugandan waters.

If one could draw a triangle, tracing a route from Kisumu and matching it with another coming from Jinja, here is the island I wanted to name after the person who saved my life. It is a good six hours by boat from the coasts of Kenya and at least twice that from those of Uganda.
The policemen with their spears take about half that time. But they had never been here before.

The island had a strange shape of leavened bread, or the back of those trailing animals I saw in Kisumu.
It must have been two hundred metres long and fifty metres wide.
A rock with a bit of grass on it, nothing more. Comfortable enough to make a tin shack and put my things on it.
In the course of time I had two goats (no, not like you think, for that I go to Kisumu trying not to think of my mother, and in any case with my peers, just so I don't make a mistake...) and a vegetable garden, where only spinach grew. Better than nothing.

Migingo Island was a gold mine.
Every morning I loaded the boat with fish, there were at least a hundred kilos.
I had also upgraded the engine, so in four hours I was in Kisumu, sold, bought something for the island and was back before the sun went down.
You can't imagine what a sight it is to see the starlit sky in the middle of a lake whose limits you can't see. It's all blue, all around and above.
And you fall asleep happy to have come into the world right there and that way.

Nevertheless I was worried for the future, that sooner or later someone might discover my hiding place, my fish mine, my little private paradise. So I used to tell people in Kisumu that I lived in Jinja and vice versa, and every now and then I would meet fishing boats to whom I would give good information about other currents good for perch, so much so that they held me in high regard and did not ask many questions, as did the policemen in their fast lances, to whom I would give tips on the routes of Ugandans from whom I could get a few extra quid.
The problems could come from the new lake adventurers, who were not fishermen and did not have their own rules and philosophy.

They were pirates or poor people, who had chosen to leave the mainland because it did not give them enough to live on or because they were not clever or mean enough to stand up to the abuse of their fellow men.
For me, on the other hand, who was alone and peaceful, they were clever and mean enough.
When they came one night to take away my goats, of which there were seven at the time, and the boat engine, I did not even notice.
It took me five nights to meet, with the strength of my arms and oars, my Tanzanian friends who took me to Bukoba to buy a second-hand motor to pay in instalments. They vouched for me. By then, however, they knew about the island, because they had dragged me there to leave the boat and were now taking me back. I told them to keep it a secret, on pain of future silence on the perch's currents.

A few days later a fishing boat arrived instead. They were people from Kisumu, whom I knew.
They were kind, as anyone is always kind to me, but they also said that Migingo was certainly not mine and that I could not buy it, so it would be useful to share it with someone, especially since there was so much fish that would give them income without impoverishing me.
I told them about the dangers of the Tanzanian pirates and they replied that we would organise ourselves with guard shifts. In fact things were going well, their two tin shacks were on the opposite side of the road from mine, on a slight slope, to get some shade. My palm trees, meanwhile, had already grown. On their side everything was still barren and there were even more rocks. I was no longer the master of Migingo, but I was still there first. Within a few months there were five huts, plus mine. The fishermen's relatives had understood or someone had failed to keep the secret. By this time I was only selling in Jinjia, because the stalls in Kisumu were full of pink perch. One afternoon I noticed that a boat was following me. I switched off the engine to let it catch up with me, as it was already too close to Migingo. But the boat turned around and disappeared over the horizon.

When I arrived on the island, I found a real tin construction company.
Within a few moons there were already seventy shacks in that tiny space. Two guys from Homa Bay, two luo so tall that they had a custom-made shack that looked like a small skyscraper compared to the others, opened the first bar. They came back from selling fish with all kinds of booze, they had a small generator that ran the lights, the stereo and a tiny fridge, but most of all they brought freshly made Chang'a, a deadly tuber schnapps that instantly knocked you out, making life in the spit of the world that was the island for them more bearable.

Perhaps I am sentimental, perhaps just a fish that, like its fellows, can go in shoals, crushed in the whirlpool of a current together with a thousand others, or solitary, searching for holes and crevices on the bottom of stones and slime, but I was still fine in my shack, with my two little goats, my palm trees and my spinach. A few days later, two boats landed in Migingo. One wasn't quite clear whether it was a male who had been run over by a truck and reattached with the first pieces found at the hospital, including a pair of tits, or a lake monster from the Ssese archipelago.

The other looked like the oar of a big boat and was totally brainless, probably drowned long ago in the Chang'a. However they paid their shack five times more than normal to the two luo of the Migingo Pub (the only consolation in this story is that the island kept the name I gave it) and that was the only form of exploitation. To go to them, every night, there was a queue. The two of them had hired a cripple, rumoured to be a cousin of one of them, who controlled the payments and above all stopped the dancing when the girls failed, even though the lake monster, who was very attached to money and did not want to live that life much longer, had given orders to be revived, at least a couple of times, with salts on purpose. The oar, on the other hand, did not hold much, which was also why it cost a bit more.

The Ugandans arrived one morning when I had not gone out. By then I had reduced my activity to just two trips, the other times I would just take tips to point out to my barrack neighbours the best spots to fish, since they had always been farmers. In return, at last, the first tomatoes were sprouting.

There were about a dozen of them and they talked to the luo from the bar, who were now the bosses of the island, even though they only consulted with other heads of the fish trade and me on matters of weather or currents and routes. They demanded a small slice of Migingo in exchange for their silence with the authorities. There seemed to be a dispute around that island and it was not clear whether it was Kenyan or Ugandan. Not knowing it, neither government had ever asked the question.

One of the Ugandans, in any case, was a policeman.
So the deal was struck. The island was now overflowing with people, there was even room for another pub, which did not compete too much with the two bosses luo, because it was for Muslims and did not sell alcohol, except surreptitiously. On the other hand, it cooked excellent furu croquettes and also some strange desserts to eat while drinking cinnamon tea.
When the Tanzanian pirates returned, this time they were armed.
They started firing from offshore and the bullets would ricochet or get stuck in the plate. They threatened to put the island to the sword and started with two boats. At that point, in order to save their lives, they were given engines and money.

A misfortune for Migingo, but also an event that for the first time made all the people of the island, including the Ugandans, feel as one.
They all had the same problems and the same expectations. So together they would come out of the crisis, working and taking the necessary precautions. By the next day, the price of the most prized perch had risen and weapons had been bought from Rwandan smugglers in Kisumu. The fishiness of Migingo was such, although already diminished since I had discovered it, that no one would have dreamed of abandoning it, and anyone would have defended their boat and shack at any cost.

But nothing can be done when authority dictates the rules.
You can try to make your case, you can rebel, but the fear of being taken to prison or even approached politely and then brutally murdered on the high seas is too great to dare.
When the Ugandan police arrived and planted a flag on the island, the two luo from the bar immediately came to terms with the devil, fixing the fee, and so did the fishermen afterwards. He says it was the same policeman who had been given a slice of the island who called them, to defend their interests from pirates.

In short, Migingo had become Ugandan but for those who come to check, everything is fine.
‘There are only a few refugees who get by selling perch’ is the report to the port authorities.
In the evening, in the pub, the Kenyans however did not like the fact that the Ugandans had planted their flag.
By what right? Had they shown them a paper, a map confirming that Migingo was Ugandan?
So they decided that in any case, they would rather pay the pizzo to a Kenyan officer than to a ‘black man’, as they called the Ugandans, who are often darker than they are. A few days later the Kenyan maritime police also arrived, with a less beautiful lance than the Ugandan, but cleaner uniforms. In an official ceremony, they removed the flag of the neighbouring state and planted that of Kenya.
The appointment was set for the last day of the month, when the Ugandans would come to collect the bribes.
And the ‘black blacks’ arrived punctually as only when there is a collection to be made. Their faces are one of the funniest memories I keep of the island.

When they saw the Kenyan flag, they were on the verge of loading their machine guns, then when they also saw the Kisumu officer, whom they already knew from some verbal clashes on the high seas over other disputes, they understood.
‘We arrived first’
‘Actually our people, meaning Kenyan citizens, arrived first.’
‘The island is Ugandan’
‘Show us an official map to prove it’
‘We are having it made.’
‘We are having it done too, our governments will take care of it’
‘Unless...’
‘Unless?’
‘We don't leave everything as it is and divide’
‘We are in reason, ‘black black’, so we don't divide a damn thing’
‘Black black will be your mother, after my brother got over it...’
‘Your brother got it back because you're impotent...’
Shoving, punching, and almost weapons follow.
It is the two officers, still on the ground, who shout to end it.
Now the matter is in the hands of the two governments and everyone knows Migingo.

Journalists have come to interview us, televisions to film us.
It has been more than 20 years that we do not know whether this tiny spit of the world in the middle of the biggest spit of Africa is Ugandan or Kenyan.
For the mountains it is easier, the first one to get there plants his flag and if there is no other, it means that no one has ever got there. When I arrived in Migingo, first, I wouldn't have known which flag to plant, because even today I don't know whether I am Ugandan or Kenyan.
Or even Rwandan, Zambian, Zairean or a strange kind of Tanzanian with a mother who unusually did a trade older than fishing.
The curious thing is that while the stupid humans were fighting it out, the pink perch decided to leave, and now there are only furu and tasteless perch around Migingo.
So I took my little boat, I upgraded my engine, I have petrol reserves and two little goats.
I follow the current of the good perch.
He knows the man and he knows me.
He always knows where to take me.
But that is another story that I don't know if I will ever tell to anyone but a fish.

Author's note: This story is based on a legend, which tells how the small island of Migingo, on the border between the territorial waters of Kenya and Uganda in Lake Victoria and at the centre of a long-standing dispute between the two states, was inhabited by a single fisherman until a few decades ago. Before it became the crossroads of the East African fish trade and a source of income for many.