🇦🇮 Anguilla Radio

Anguilla keeps a string-band tradition alive that few islands still have, and pairs it with a national obsession found nowhere else: boat racing, the island's official sport, contested in hand-built wooden sloops. The August Summer Festival brings calypso, soca and street parades to The Valley. Anguillian radio carries that mix along with reggae, gospel and community news. Tune into Anguilla live on J.A.W Online from wherever you are.

The island that seceded to stay British

Anguilla has one of the odder constitutional histories in the Caribbean. Grouped with Saint Kitts and Nevis as a single colony, Anguillians objected strongly enough to being governed from Basseterre that in the late 1960s they expelled the Kittitian police, declared independence from the federation, and asked to be taken back under direct British rule. Britain eventually sent troops — and then, essentially, agreed.

The result is a small, flat, dry island of around 15,000 people that remains a British Overseas Territory by its own insistence. It has no rivers, limited agriculture, and built its economy first on salt and seafaring and now almost entirely on tourism.

Boat racing, the national sport

Anguilla is the only country in the world whose national sport is boat racing, and it is not a metaphor. The boats are hand-built wooden sloops, designed and constructed on the island to a distinctive local pattern, raced with large crews and enormous sail area, launched off the beach rather than from a marina.

The tradition grew directly out of the schooner trade, when Anguillian seamen sailed to Santo Domingo and beyond for work and raced each other home. Each boat has a following that behaves rather like a football supporters' club, races are held throughout the year, and the August Monday race off Sandy Ground is the biggest day in the Anguillian calendar.

None of this is staged for visitors. It is the thing Anguillians care most about, and the radio commentary on race day reflects that entirely.

String band and the Summer Festival

Anguilla's traditional music is string band — guitar, banjo, bass and percussion — and the island has kept it more successfully than most of its neighbours, with bands still playing at festivals and celebrations rather than only at heritage events.

The Summer Festival, running around Emancipation in late July and early August, combines the carnival apparatus of calypso competitions, J'ouvert and parades with the boat racing that is the real centre of gravity. It is a carnival organised around a regatta, which is not a description that fits anywhere else.

The radio landscape and listening from abroad

For a population of 15,000 the dial is respectable, with a government service and several commercial and community stations covering reggae, soca, gospel and local talk. Radio Anguilla has been broadcasting since the era of the constitutional dispute and carries a certain institutional weight.

Anguillians abroad are concentrated in the United Kingdom, the US Virgin Islands, Saint Martin and the north-eastern United States. The community is small enough that the streams function as a village noticeboard — deaths, church services, race results and the festival.

Hurricane Irma passed directly over the island in the late 2010s and caused severe damage. As elsewhere in the region, radio was what kept working.

Live stations from Anguilla (1)

• Klass FM 92.9 Caribbean Music Learn more about Klass FM 92.9