A journey to the heart of darkness
◆ Forty five years ago, more than 900 people from the Peoples Temple died at the Jonestown massacre in Guyana. There is still much we don’t understand about the mass murder-suicide, writes author Annie Dawid
The first body I saw was off to the side, alone. Five more steps and I saw another and another and another; hundreds of bodies. The Newsweek reporter was walking around saying, “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.” Another guy said, “It’s unreal.” Then nobody even attempted to speak anymore. It was overwhelming. Bizarre.” – Tim Cahill, Rolling Stone, January 1979.
If you were conscious on November 18, 1978 and the week to follow, with access to a television and print media, you saw heaps of cadavers strewn across a jungle landscape in formerly British Guyana amid rapidly changing headlines. “Congressman Leo Ryan Assassinated on Jungle Airstrip, Journalists Ambushed.” “400 Dead in Compound, 400 missing.”
Then 600, 800, 900 plus dead.
You may not recollect that 80 per cent of those bodies were African-american, and two out of three were female. One third were children and another third elderly. Most likely you recall cyanidespiked Kool-aid (actually Flavor-aid) in an upright tin tub, for no one dared tip it over. You don’t remember colourcoded syringes: one for infants, one for children, one for adults. You might know that the group leader died of a gunshot to the left temple – whether murder or suicide will never be determined. Mr Muggs, the compound’s pet chimpanzee, and several dogs were also found dead, one bullet for each animal.
You read about a megalomaniac/ monomaniac/charismatic named Jim Jones, who had delivered so many people from California to an agricultural project 24 hours of hard travel from the country’s capital, Georgetown.
The name of the project was Jonestown.
From the beginning, mass media told the world a story about crazy people, all of them blind followers of a madman, mad enough to drink poison, killing their children before taking their own lives.
Four hundred reporters from around the world converged on Georgetown. Four survivors of the massacre as well as those who’d been going to the dentist, or playing basketball, or doing administrative work for Peoples Temple in the city talked, or refused to talk to the media. Temple headquarters in Lamaha Gardens remained under guard by the Guyanese Defense Force while the PM Forbes Burnham-led Guyanese government, the United States and the world attempted to understand what had happened in Jonestown, a short plane ride to the interior.
What happened
In 1978 Congressman Leo Ryan, Democrat from San Mateo, California, travelled to Guyana to investigate claims that people were being held against their will at the Peoples Temple, Jonestown, at the behest of constituent members of the Concerned Relatives, a group of former Temple members and/or families with loved ones in Jonestown. Some Concerned Relatives, as well as reporters, accompanied the Congressman, along with aides, a Guyanese government minister and a US ambassador. The short airstrip at Port Kaituma could only accommodate a plane with 19 seats.
A group of Temple gunmen had driven to the airstrip after Ryan’s departure from Jonestown and opened fire, killing Ryan, three reporters, and one defecting Temple member, critically wounding many others. The gunmen fled on their tractor to the compound seven miles away.
Within hours, almost all remaining members of Peoples Temple, would ingest poison – voluntarily or not – and die. Their bodies would swell immediately under the equatorial sun; 253 remained forever unidentified, most of them children. The US military took several days to bring enough coffins to transport them back to Dover Air Force base in Delaware, where they sat for days on the airstrip while the governor tried to evict them, fearing a macabre shrine if massacre victims were buried in his state. A handful of autopsies were conducted.
The unclaimed dead would eventually be trucked across the country to an Oakland, California cemetery where they were collectively interred on a hillside under a plaque reading “In Memory of the victims of the Jonestown Tragedy, Nov. 18, 1978, Jonestown, Guyana.”
“We were shown a bakeshop, a machine shop, a brick-making area. There were shoes in the mud and on the grass and in the fields. A disproportionate number were children’s shoes, sandals no bigger than the palm of your hand.” – Rolling Stone.
Forty five years later
All these years later, what happened at Jonestown remains mysterious. Conspiracy theories about CIA mindcontrol experiments flourished. Other mass suicides – Solar Temple, Heaven’s Gate, and most recently, this year’s Shakahola Massacre in Kenya have followed. Scholars of every discipline struggle to understand this phenomenon of mass suicide, including the Religious Studies field, New Religious Movements, derogatively referred to as cults.
Hundreds of non-fiction books, films, scholarly articles, memoirs and artistic works have been published, attempting to understand this story. Two Hollywood films are in the works, one with Leonard Dicaprio as Jim Jones, are in preparation for the 50-year anniversary. The relentless focus on the group’s leader has left out the more than 900 dead: elderly pensioners relieved to be out of America’s ghettos and cared for, children, including the 33 babies born in Jonestown, playing freely; Utopian-minded college graduates trying to build a racism-free world in the spirit of the international Utopian tradition.
Forty-five years on, we refer to the event as a Mass Murder-suicide, because evidence indicates large numbers were threatened at gunpoint to swallow that infamous drink. Every anniversary brings new stories and revelations of the lives lost that day.
Two Hollywood films are in the works, one with Leonard Dicaprio as Jim Jones
Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown by Annie Dawid will be published on November 18 by Inkspot Publishing, available in paperback and e-book, priced £8.99