The Admiral describes the night as more of “a cultural exchange within the realm of a soundclash” than a fully fledged battle for pre-eminence. On May 26, the festival’s second night, the Admiral faced off against a local sound system called Brap International before a crowd that included dub poet Mutabaruka, Linton Kwesi Johnson and cast members of the classic Jamaican film The Harder They Come. This year’s programme, incidentally, included the Admiral’s father, Ronnie Kasrils, a former South African intelligence minister, who had met one of the organisers, Kwame Dawes, at a literary festival in Durban earlier this year. The programme includes days and evenings of literary discussions capped by nights of revelry and live music.
It draws an international crowd, a coterie of Jamaican intellectuals as well as the local community. The annual event, which has been running since 2001, takes place at Treasure Beach, a fishing community on Jamaica’s south coast.
The event, titled Jubilation 50, was also in celebration of a half-century of Jamaican independence. Through Cooper, Niaah and the Jamaican High Commission, Admiral found himself in a battle for bragging rights at Jamaica’s annual Calabash Literary Festival, which ran from May 25 to 27. In February the Admiral met author Sonjah Stanley Niaah and Ibo Cooper of reggae group Third World at a Jamaican ambassadorial forum in Pretoria on the role of reggae music in the African liberation struggle. Given the casual spread of “specials” on the Admiral and Jahseed’s African Storm mix CD series, now in its sixth volume, you would be forgiven for imagining the pair trudging through Kingston’s back alleys recording dubplate after dubplate with reggae legends such as Capleton, Luciano or Tony Rebel.Īlthough technology has made it possible for sound systems to build their arsenals of narcissistic tunes through email, it is only in the dancehall context of “clashing” - a song-for-song public contest between two opposing mobile discotheques - that superiority can be established.
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