Bullets and Kool-Aid in a place called Jonestown, 39 years later

Nov 19, 2017 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols

People don’t really commemorate the thirty-ninth anniversary of an event; the 40th yes, so next year many will recall what is  considered the most surreal act of depravity ever perpetrated on Guyanese soil – ‘our own’ crime of the century  in a toxic haze of Kool-Aid, bullets, and syringes on a warm November night in 1978.

Much has been said and written about the tragedy of Jonestown, the social and political environment that helped shape it in the United States and in Guyana, and the crushing ego that urged its calamitous climax. With each passing year, young Guyanese are becoming acquainted or reacquainted with what transpired as night fell on the People’s Temple in the Port Kaituma jungle, and darkness engulfed almost a thousand souls nearly four decades ago.

Hundreds of media exposes, magazine articles and books on Jonestown over the past three decades give horrendous details, numerous analyses and tangled conspiracy theories. And one simple, searchingly- frank question – how did one man’s words and actions appear to override commonsense and the instinct of self-preservation (common to all humans) in a thousand of his followers? How more than 900 individuals were coaxed and coerced into ending their lives, or unfeelingly murdered.

This brief background commentary on the Jonestown fiasco draws upon research done by psychiatrists and sociologists as well as internet sources, including a recently published interview with journalist Jeff Guinn who wrote ‘The Road to Jonestown,’ and a 1979 Rolling Stone article that featured first-hand accounts by Miami Herald photographer, Tim Chapman, and a handful of survivors interviewed at the Park Hotel on Main street three days after the tragedy.

I interacted briefly with about a dozen Jonestown residents at a second-hand shop the People’s Temple operated at Kumaka during my teaching stint in the North West District. Yet half the story cannot be told here.

Jones, born in Indiana, USA, in 1931, was a man in whom many people saw the blended qualities of love, militancy, and compassion for the oppressed. He preached equality and justice, and as a religious leader, established in 1950 a Peoples’ Temple storefront church in Indianapolis, then one of the most segregated American cities, and succeeded in making it one of the first major mixed-race establishments there. He fed the hungry and clothed the needy and homeless – mostly black Americans.

Appealing to the ideals of social justice and civil rights, he became admired and politically connected, yet became disenchanted with the greed and injustice he observed in his homeland

Others, though, were beginning to see disturbing traits. Jones avowed he was Marxist, with ties to the Communist Party USA, and his dream of a Utopian socialist paradise seemed achievable, yet he was described as deceitful, manipulative, and power-hungry by more astute observers, and a demagogue by others. He partly offset these perceptions by adopting several non-white children with his wife Marcelline, referring to his clan as a rainbow family; and giving his own name to a black adopted son – James Warren Jones. His associates included several influential names including First Lady Rosalynn Carter, Angela Davis, and the NAACP; ironically he was bestowed with the Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award one year before be orchestrated the deaths of hundreds of poor, mostly black, followers.

By the late 1960s, Jones was turning away from biblical Christianity calling it a ‘fly-away’ religion and a tool to oppress women and children. (They were the first to die at Jonestown) Non-American Socialism was the thing. He exhorted, “If you’re born in capitalist America, racist America, fascist America, then you’re born in sin. But if you’re born in socialism, you’re not …”

Jones heard of Forbes Burnham’s cooperative socialism in the early seventies, and it must have been music to his ears. A later US government report divulged a ‘strong working relationship between the People’s Temple and the government of Guyana’, with the former regarded as being practically outside Guyanese law. Until Saturday, November 18, 1978.

In 1974, the People’s Temple (PT) negotiated the lease of 3,800 acres of jungle land near Port Kaituma. Under trying, humid conditions, members laboriously carved out an agricultural and residential plot. By 1977, a mass migration of PT members from California swelled the population, and the enclave, now renamed Jonestown, to over 1,000.

It was hard work coaxing the barely-fertile soil to yield ground provisions and greens, rearing livestock, and erecting buildings for residential, education, and religious purposes.  And while a semblance of normalcy was displayed for visitors, members’ freedom of speech and movement were severely curtailed; at the same time they were made to feel that Jones was actually saving them from imminent martial law and nuclear war in America. He had already convinced them to ‘donate’ everything they had, including money and passports, and that despite the hardships, living as they did was far better than their previous lives back home.

Paranoia and megalomania were soon added to Jones’ demagoguery, and to some followers it was evident that things were not going according to plan. There were defections in the United States. Others dismissed the insidious influence even when he proclaimed himself God.

Forced loyalty to ‘Dad’,  public humiliating ‘confessions’, beatings, and forced sex, were all part of Jones’ discipline regimen, and they bore them stoically. How many of them knew of his predatory sexual nature, and the stockpiling of drugs and guns is questionable. But they knew of the ‘white nights’ when Jones tested their ultimate loyalty by forcing them to drink a Kool-Aid punch which was poisoned, he said, so that they could end their lives in a revolutionary act of martyrdom. He would tell them afterward that it wasn’t really poisoned, but a test of loyalty. When the real thing happened, many thought it was another white night. They were dead wrong.

By then, relatives in the United States and people on the outside realized the People’s Temple had become a cult; even some inside sensed the danger. Articles were written; denials were staged, but relatives convinced the US Government to send a team to investigate the Guyana-based group.

Headed by California Congressman Leo Ryan, the team spent two days in Guyana, travelling to Jonestown on Friday, November 17th 1978. Jones and his followers entertained with a show of camaraderie and unity, but a somber mood descended the next day when a number of residents sought to leave with the congressman. Jones was clearly angry, adding to now full-blown paranoia, as he warned that the commune was about to be attacked and destroyed; that Guyanese soldiers were approaching with guns.

A group of armed Temple members, pretending to be defectors, trailed Congressman Ryan and his team to the Port Kaituma airstrip where two Guyana Airways planes were waiting. Shots were fired. Ryan and five others, including two NBC journalists, fell to the ground, fatally wounded. They died there. Back in Jonestown the news spread quickly. The end was indeed imminent. A half-drum of grape Flavor-aid was mixed with cyanide, syringes were filled with a milky liquid; guns were drawn and pointed, crossbows were strung. It was the beginning of the ‘revolutionary act’ Jones had referred to earlier.

The infants and small children were served first. Sobs and screams filled the air as some protested, struggled, and were forcefully injected. Families lay down and died together; some older folk were injected in their wheelchairs. A few escaped into the surrounding jungle. Before Jones ended his own life with a bullet to the head, he urged, “There are no convulsions … stop these hysterics … Die with a degree of dignity …” But many died writhing in agony. He deceived them to the end.

I end on a personal note. Months before the tragedy, two women at the PT shop begged my wife and I to adopt our son who had been born deaf. Somehow they knew or sensed our struggle, mostly financial. We were greatly surprised, and of course, turned down the offer. I later found out that almost 300 children died at Jonestown. Had our son been there he would undoubtedly have been one. I can live without that kind of guilt. What about the survivors of Jonestown?

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