Jonestown 37 years after

In those days, most of the news came through the radio and some from the popular newspapers. The first reports were that hundreds were dead, but by the time the newspaper could get images of the massacre at Jonestown, the radio news had already confirmed that more than 900 had died.

With no Internet or television available, Guyanese were glued to their radio sets at midday and in the evening to listen to the updates coming out of Jonestown. It was the second most newsworthy story in Guyana; the first being that of Guyana’s Independence.

But on November 19, 1978 when the first reports hit the local media it was the number one story in the world. Nine hundred and fourteen members of the People’s Temple had been poisoned after being forced to drink Kool-Aid laced with deadly cyanide.

Today, 37 years later, it is still remembered around the world, but everything from Jonestown has been stripped in the years since the deaths. The locals and to a lesser extent the Government made use of the machinery, the lumber of the structures, personal belongings of the individuals, educational resources from the school, utensils from the kitchen, medical supplies, the beds where people slept, the cottages and other things that made up the community.

The patch of rainforest in Guyana where Jim Jones moved his People’s Temple in the 1970s has been almost entirely reclaimed by the jungle. Locals say if you search long enough, you can still find remnants of a tractor used for transport and agriculture and a filing cabinet that would have kept documents about the community. The metal drums in which Jones mixed cyanide and Kool-Aid in preparation for the mass murder-suicide which took place at the site 37 years ago are also still in place.

Reverend Jim Jones made no news when he came to Guyana and brought with him close to 1000 followers of the People’s Temple. Most of his followers were Black Americans and most of them female. Statistics indicate that about 375 were Black American women.

Many of Jim Jones’ followers were street people; he picked them up and told them of a better life. Teri Buford O’Shea fled Jonestown three weeks before all its inhabitants all died. In her writings about Jim Jones and Jonestown, she states, “I was 19 years old when I joined the People’s Temple in Redwood Valley, California. It was 1971, and I was homeless when a man pulled up alongside me in a van. He told me about the community where he lived – a place, he said, where no one had to worry about food or housing. The leader was a visionary who was building a new future. I gladly took the ride. After all, I assumed, if I didn’t like the People’s Temple, I could always leave.”

In her writings, O’Shea said on November 18, 1978 she had left Jonestown to visit Georgetown and her life was spared. “Nine hundred and fourteen brainwashed men, women and children died in agony after poisoning themselves on the orders of a power-crazed cult leader who convinced them he was the Second Coming. The place where they fell was Jonestown, a remote commune in north-western Guyana named after its founder, Jim Jones – the evil architect of this terrible tragedy.”

In 1978, Captain Gerry Gouveia, who worked with the Guyana Defence Force as a pilot, flew army personnel to the scene and was among the first to visit the area after the mass suicide. Gouveia, who is now a successful businessman in aviation, is of the view that Jonestown should become a tourist attraction. “What we need to do is attract people to come to Guyana, whether that attraction is Jonestown or Kaieteur Falls or birding or ecotourism or cricket, to see what a wonderful country Guyana has turned out to be,” says Gouveia, who now runs his own airline and tour company.

Carlton Daniels is the former postmaster in Port Kaituma, a mining community close to the old Jonestown compound. He’s one of the few residents who remember what happened there. “Bringing in some tourist dollars could be good for development. There’s a lot of gold mining right now, but minerals don’t last forever,” he says.

Nine years ago, the Guyana Emergency Relief Committee erected a plaque at the site which reads, ‘In Memory of the Victims of the Jonestown Tragedy’.

Meanwhile, even close to four decades after the Jonestown incident many are still baffled to know who Jones was. Why did so many believe in him so unquestioningly?

Jones was the son of an abusive, alcoholic father. James Warren Jones was born in 1931 and raised in an anonymous town in Indiana, where he is said to have killed his friends’ pets so that they would pay him to dispose of them in his first business venture.

By his early 20s he and his wife, Marceline, had founded their first evangelical church, and by most accounts he appeared a well-meaning local pastor. They also became the first couple in the state to adopt a black baby; rather a departure for Jones’s father, who was in the Ku Klux Klan. They later expanded their ‘rainbow family’ to include a Korean child.

In 1978, many of Reverend Jim Jones’ followers had started to show some level of resistance to his dictatorship style and made contact with relatives back home. This prompted Californian Congressman Leo Ryan accompanied by a group of journalists to visit Jonestown. They arrived on November 17, and Jones feigned to welcome them. He gave them food and shelter for the night and even allowed Ryan to use his PA system to remind the members of the People’s Temple that they were free to determine their own future.

The following day, when 16 disciples opted to follow the politician rather than the preacher, he sent his guards to shoot Ryan and the defectors as they boarded a plane at the airstrip. The Congressman, three journalists and one of the disciples were killed in a hail of gunfire.

Shortly afterwards, back at Jonestown, the suicide order went out. The disciples were gathered around the central pavilion and ordered to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide handed out by the guards.

Some were still so devoted to Jones that they went willingly to their deaths. But many hundreds more refused his order, only to be forced at gunpoint to take the poison.