Explanation: the East African Rift Valley (EAR) is a developing divergent plate boundary in East Africa. Here the eastern portion of Africa, the Somalian plate, is pulling away from the rest of the continent, which comprises the Nubian plate.
Lake Victoria sits between these two branches. It is thought that these rifts are generally following old sutures between ancient continental masses that collided billions of years ago to form the African craton and that the split around the Lake Victoria region occurred due to the presence of a small core of ancient metamorphic rock, the Tanzania craton, that was too hard for the rift to tear through. Because the rift could not go straight through this area, it instead diverged around it leading to the two branches that can be seen today.
