| ||||
| Capital (and largest city) |
Georgetown | |||
| Language | English | |||
| Demonym | Ascension Islander, Ascender | |||
| Legislature | Legislative Council | |||
| Monarch | William V | |||
| Governor | Ian Hansen | |||
| Area | 88 km² | |||
| Population | 600 | |||
| Admission | 1994 | |||
| Currency | South African Pound (SA £) | |||
| Abbreviations | AI | |||
Ascension is one of the four Dependent Territories of the Dominion of South Africa located in the South Atlantic, alongside Saint Helena, Tristan Da Cunha, and South Georgia. Like the other three, it was a British crown colony before 1983. Totally abandoned in the 1980s, it was later resettled by people from the Falklands who had left in the wake of their islands' takeover by Argentina.
History[]
Background[]
One of the world's youngest landmasses, Ascension emerged from the sea around one million years ago. Its landscape is covered with cinder and lava flows with very little natural vegetation. A dormant volcano, it last erupted a few centuries ago. The first humans to see the island were Portuguese sailors on Ascension Day, 1501.
The United Kingdom first annexed Ascension Island at the same time that it made Saint Helena into a prison for Napoleon. For its first hundred years under British control, it was legally considered a ship of the Royal Navy. It became a useful victualling station for ships in the Atlantic. The British radically changed the island's ecosystem, importing trees, grasses, and even soil in order to create local sources of food and water. The programme worked, creating a terraformed environment unique on Earth, though the local ecology was wiped out by the torrent of invasive species.
Ascension's role in global communications began in 1899 when an undersea telegraph cable connected it to the All Red Line that linked much of the British Empire. The twentieth century brought new installations from both Britain and the United States: a USAF airfield, a NASA tracking station, a GCHQ signal interception facility, a BBC relay station, and a ground control antenna for the Global Positioning System. The air base was expanded in 1982, when Ascension became the staging area for British operations in the Falkland Islands.
The island passed from naval to civil rule in 1922, when it received an Administrator beholden to the governor of Saint Helena. But Ascension never got a permanent population. Everyone on the island was considered a temporary resident and expected to return home at some point, whether to Britain or the United States.
Ascension Island's many communications and radar facilities made it strategically significant, but as a nuclear target its priority was much lower than the bases with which it communicated. It may have been the designated target for a submarine-based Soviet missile that never arrived. On 26 September 1983, everyone on the island scrambled into bunkers and basements, then slowly emerged into a very different world.
Evacuation[]
Ascension's communication facilities remained useful for the surviving British and American military, permitting long-range signals to be sent between widely dispersed ships and facilities. It allowed for communication between the British emergency government and South Africa, where Britain's heir apparent (and from 1984, king) Andrew was sheltering. But these emergency governments slowly lost cohesion. The messages grew less frequent over the next few years before going silent.
Without regular supply shipments, the island could not support the one thousand people stationed there. As many as possible boarded aircraft to fly for the nearest safe part of the mainland, Natal in Brazil. Those who remained tried to continue in their duties, but their situation grew desperate. They asked for rescue, but no one in Africa or Brazil, and certainly not in Europe, was willing to spend valuable fuel on such an expedition.
In 1987, the Second Convoy sailed from Britain to South Africa, hoping that British ships could be better maintained under the new regime based in Port Elizabeth and naming King Andrew its head of state. A transport from this convoy finally got permission to answer the pleas of the Ascension Islanders. Everyone except a skeleton crew was evacuated to Africa. The few dozen left behind were given enough supplies to sustain them, however uncomfortably, for a few years.
Two years later, another expedition returned to bring the remaining crew back to Port Elizabeth. An even smaller crew replaced them, shutting down most of the facilities and staying only to make sure that the relay station could keep running. They did not stay long, and the island sat abandoned for some time. What was left of Britain no longer had the capacity to maintain Ascension Island, and the emerging Dominion of South Africa had far more pressing concerns.
Resettlement[]
The DSA formally annexed Ascension in 1990, together with other British territories in the South Atlantic and Antarctica. By now, plans were already forming to resettle Ascension with Falkland Islanders who had fled to frigid South Georgia Island. Over 900 refugees were attempting to live there, far exceeding the land's capacity to support them. If a tough, self-sufficient people could eke out a living on Ascension, they could keep the island in the right hands until a military presence could be restored.
The resettlement took time to plan. The South Georgia refugees were temporarily housed in Africa while the supplies and equipment could be assembled, a process which took years given the many other demands on the DSA's resources.
A transport brought the first group of Falklanders to Ascension in 1994, together with a small team of botanists and ecologists to help them begin planting and husbandry. Another group of techs brought the relay station back online. The new colonists disembarked in their new home - their third time doing so in just over a decade - ready to work hard and accept the privations of founding a new settlement. The technicians flew the flag of the Dominion of South Africa, but the Falklanders proudly raised the Union Jack.
The rest of the willing South Georgia transplants crossed over to the island during the next few years and soon were running a bustling, struggling settlement. Water and supplies were still tightly regulated, but the territory was able to feed itself. The crop suite was quite different to what the people had known before - bananas and guavas now supplemented the all-important sheep grazing on the hills - but the people adapted.
The air force base was partially restored in the mid-2000s, mostly to use for emergency landings of transatlantic flights.
New nation[]
Life on Ascension Island settled into a quiet routine of planting and harvest not unlike the other South Atlantic islands. The few hundred inhabitants formed a close-knit community that drew strength from a deep well of shared experience: British identity, the traumas of the 80s, and setting out to start over - twice - on uninhabited rocks in the ocean. Even while the Dominion tried to present itself as an authentically African nation, the islanders looked to it as the embodiment of Britishness that had ensured their survival.
But the world continued to turn, and outsiders continued to be interested in Ascension Island. The economic growth of West Africa put the island on a major sea route between Lagos and Rio. So the Dominion set up a marine rescue station in the early 2000s, not only to guarantee the safety of sailors and passengers, but also to stop any other power from thinking about taking over the island.
In 2001, the Guiana Space Centre launched its first test rocket. Ascension Island and its mothballed NASA radar station were ideally placed to support this effort. Brazil accordingly arranged a lease of the station, with some of the money going to the Dominion and the rest supporting conservation and infrastructure projects on the island itself. There was some local backlash, as the Brazilians were perceived as being in league with the hated Argentines, and the radar station remains controversial. South American flags and symbols are absent from the facility, but the crew, always entirely Brazilian, enjoys generally cordial relations with locals in town.
In 2015, King Andrew was planning to make the first visit of a reigning monarch to Ascension Island, but his plane was lost while en route. His son William V made the visit a few months later. Despite the tragic backdrop, the visit was well received and did much to cement the islanders' satisfaction and loyalty toward the Dominion of South Africa.
Government[]
Ascension's government is based as closely as possible on the former system of the Falkland Islands. A Governor represents the Crown. As in the other Atlantic islands, the governor is now elected rather than appointed but must be approved by the DSA's Foreign Ministry. The governor presides over a Legislative Council. The Financial Secretary sits alongside the governor as a council member, while the other five members are elected.
The military personnel stationed on Ascension are much smaller in number than had been the case during the prewar era. Generally speaking they are outside the jurisdiction of the local government, unless someone commits a crime while off base.
National symbols[]
Like the other South Atlantic Islands, Ascension uses a British blue ensign to represent the heritage of the territory and its people. The island received a new identifying symbol: a heraldic badge featuring an ascending dove to allude to its name. As the people put down roots in the island, they began to reinterpret the dove as a fairy tern, one of the island's distinctive forms of wildlife. This designation was later made official by act of the Legislative Council.
Above the bird's head are five stars in a cross pattern, a device taken from the Falklander coat of arms to represent the people's origins. Behind the badge are two crossed anchors, which was a symbol of the old Victualling Board in Great Britain. This represents the island's past and present role in world travel and communication.
Privately, the people are much more likely to fly the British Union Flag alone to represent their nationhood, leaving the flag of Ascension Island to the official organs of state. Local law endorses this practice and names the Union Jack as an official civic symbol. The Dominion of South Africa's national flag is restricted to the air force base and other military facilities.