Jonestown: Paradise Undone
“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, with access to a television and print media, you saw heaps of cadavers strewn across a jungle landscape in the former British Guyana: “Congressman Leo Ryan Assassinated on Jungle Airstrip, Journalists Ambushed.” “400 Dead in Compound, 400 missing.” Then 600, 800, 900+ dead.
You may not recollect that 80% of those bodies were African-American, and 2/3 female. One third were children and another third elderly. You might recall cyanide-spiked Kool-Aid (actually Flavor-Aid) in an upright tub no one dared tip over. You don’t remember color-coded syringes: one for infants, one for children, one for adults. You might know the group leader died of a gunshot to the left temple – whether murder or suicide never to be determined.
You read about a megalomaniac/monomaniac/charismatic named Jim Jones, deliverer of so many Americans from California to an agricultural project 24 hours of hard travel from the capital, Georgetown.
Site of the massacre: Jonestown.
Mass media told the world a story about crazy people, blind followers of a madman, mad enough to drink poison, killing their children before taking their own lives.
The wrong story, as it turns out.
Four hundred reporters from around the world converged on Georgetown. 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.
Congressman Leo Ryan, Democrat, had traveled there at the behest of constituent members of the Concerned Relatives. Reporters accompanied them, 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 gunman had driven to the airstrip after Ryan’s departure from Jonestown and opened fire, killing Ryan, 3 reporters, and one defecting Temple member, critically wounding many others. The gunmen fled on their tractor to the compound 7 miles away.
Within hours, almost all remaining members of the San Francisco-based Peoples Temple, many of them from the group’s origins in Indiana, 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 U.S. 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.” Cahill
Forty-six years later, what happened at Jonestown remains mysterious. Conspiracy theories about CIA mind-control experiments flourished. Other mass suicides – Solar Temple, Heaven’s Gate, and most recently, the 2023 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, sometimes derogatively referred to as cults.
The relentless focus on the group’s leader has left out the other 913 dead: elderly pensioners relieved to be out of America’s ghettos and cared for, unafraid, in their purpose-built dormitories in the tropics; children, including the 33 babies born in Jonestown, playing freely, without fear of stepping on syringes; Utopian-minded college graduates trying to build a racism-free world in the spirit of international Utopian tradition, originated by Sir Thomas More in 1516.
Every anniversary brings new stories and revelations of the lives lost that day. We now refer to the event as a Mass Murder-Suicide, because evidence indicates large numbers were threatened at gunpoint to swallow that infamous drink.
Annie Dawid is the author of Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown which is available now.
