The Sunday Times Magazine • 27Out in “camp” is where you get a taste
of the prewar Falklands. Many settlements
are in their own time zone, “camp time”,
an hour behind Stanley, to give people
longer outdoors during the summer.
Campers still gather annually for old
traditions such as Sports Week, a boozy
days-long sleepover featuring horse racing,
shearing competitions and sheepdog
trials. Word spreads in camp through the
“diddle-dee telegraph”, a reference to
the diddle-dee shrub coating much of the
islands that produces a distinctive berry,
useful for making jam (or gin).
In camp the arrival of roads, the internet,
satellite television and smartphones has
brought globalisation to this remotest of
cultures. Stanley, on the other hand, is
positively cosmopolitan: St Helenans or
“Saints” came in the late 1980s, Chileans
turned up in the 1990s, and now Filipinos
have made their home here to work in
the supermarkets and stores around town.
A group of Zimbabweans arrived just
over a decade ago to apply their expertise
in clearing minefields. Several stayed and
brought their families with them.
On a Saturday night in Stanley I attended
a buzzing Zimbabwean Independence Day
party, featuring a maize-meal, pork stew
and yam feast. “At first it was so very cold
and windy,” says Shupi Chipunza, 44. “But
people here have welcomed me as family.
In other countries there is a lot of violence.
Here we don’t worry about the kids going
next door.” After the demining, Chipunza
became a firefighter at the military camp.
“This is my home now,” he says.
War still haunts the Falklands and its
residents, from the memorials and crosses
dotted around the battlefields to the debris
— ejector seats, twisted doors, gun casings
— still scattered around the island from
downed Argentine helicopters and Skyhawk
jets. There were still active minefields on
the island until November 2020, when the
last mines were detonated. A ceremony
was held to celebrate and hundreds of
Falklanders ran on to the gorgeous white
sands of Yorke Bay, just north of Stanley,
for the first time since it was mined in 1982.The bay’s penguins, which were light enough
to avoid blowing themselves up on the
mines, finally had their neighbours back.
The 40th anniversary of the war is a
significant undertaking, with a series of
events and memorial services taking place
over the course of May and June. But
Argentina’s refusal to give up its claim on
the islands still casts a shadow. The country
harasses Falklanders at every turn, refusing
to work with them on crucial regional
fishing agreements and putting “Malvinas”
stamps in Falklander passports when they
pass through Argentina. Jingoistic
Argentinians occasionally barrel up in the
Falklands to unveil flags and remind the
islanders that they have not renounced
their claim. Companies who work in the
Falklands face remonstrance from Argentina,
which recently revealed China as a crucial
backer of its claim to the Falklands.
On the day that Russia invaded Ukraine,
James Wallace recalls that the Argentine
navy were “out in force” pushing around
trawlers and “circling” vessels bearing the
Falklands flag. Older islanders still fear
that Britain will tire of forking out tens of
millions annually to defend these distant
islands — and once more seek to appease
Argentina. Nigel Phillips, the current
governor, insists not. “UK ministers are
not going to betray these islands, Argentina
needs to understand that,” he says.
In truth, the moment you land in the
Falklands the ancient Argentine claim on
the islands, based on a fringe territorial
squabble conducted some 200 years ago,
seems absurd. Some Falklanders may still
be more British than the British, but they
are a distinct people with an increasinglydistinct identity who have lived on these
islands for longer than Argentina has been
a country. There was never any indigenous
population here, so the Falklanders are
the locals, a leathery bunch of settlers who
have built a flourishing community in
highly unlikely circumstances. Britain is
rightly used to cringing at its imperial sins,
but when it comes to the Falklands at least,
there’s no need.
Teslyn Barkman, 34, is the youngest
woman to become a member of the
Falklands legislative assembly. She raised
a Ukrainian flag over the islands when war
broke out in Europe, noting the parallels.
“A lot of Falklanders can empathise with
having an aggressive neighbour who wants
to invade you,” she says. “Argentina plays
that same information war: we’re an
implanted population [they claim], we don’t
have a history, we don’t have a culture.”
When she attended arts college in
London, Barkman was surprised to find her
left-wing friends asking whether she was
actually Argentinian and questioning the
Falklands’ status. “You’re talking about
giving a place to another place as though
it’s a commodity,” she says. “There’s nothing
more imperialist or colonialist than that.”
The irony, of course, is that if Argentina
relaxed its belligerence towards the
Falklands the place would in time inevitably
become a bit more Argentine, simply owing
to proximity. But retaking “Las Malvinas”
is written into the Argentine constitution, a
point of principle that has become a national
rallying cry, especially in times of stress.
On my last day in the Falklands, I join
Patrick Watts for a trip up to Wireless
Ridge, a hill above Stanley where the last
battle of the campaign was fought on
June 14, 1982. Now 77, Watts became
famous on the first day of the war when
he interrupted his radio broadcast to ask
the Argentine soldiers in his studio to
stop pointing their guns at his back.
Having won the first main battle of the
war, 2 Para fought at Wireless Ridge as well,
losing three men and ending the campaign
they had begun at Goose Green. At the top
of the ridge a metal cross sits on a cairn to
mark their sacrifice, overlooking the town of
Stanley that bustles and grows in its shadow.
“One thousand men shouldn’t have
had to die to ensure democracy in the
Falklands,” Watts says. “But we’ll never
forget them. It’s always there. We hope
you see that it wasn’t in vain.” nThe fishing boom has created
“squidionnaires”. Revenues are
used to offer every child the
chance to study in the UK
From left: Zimbabwean islanders celebrate their homeland’s Independence
fi multiCultural day / faCeBooK, swnsDay last month; the last landmine is detonated at Yorke Bay, November 2020