ZJB Radio

Radio Montserrat, the national station, and an institution rather than simply a broadcaster. When the Soufrière Hills volcano began erupting in the mid-1990s, destroying Plymouth and forcing the abandonment of the southern half of the island, ZJB carried the evacuation notices, the ash-fall warnings, the scientific updates and the daily business of a community coming apart and reassembling. Roughly two-thirds of the population left, most to the United Kingdom, and more Montserratians now live abroad than on the island. The station still fills that role for a people split between the two, carrying local news, masquerade and string band music, soca and calypso, and the programming around the March St Patrick's Festival — which marks both the island's Irish heritage and the 1768 slave uprising planned for that date, and exists nowhere else in this form.