Dear Editor,

ON November 18, 1978, more than 900 members of the Peoples Temple, located not far from the Port Kaituma airstrip, died after drinking cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid. Their suicidal act was attributed to a directive from Reverend Jim Jones, the religious leader of the commune. Jones himself died from gunshot wounds.Despite the publications of seven books by Jonestown survivors about the incident, many questions remain, including the role of the Guyana Government. This tragedy has long been dismissed as an American tragedy. Prime Minister Burnham declared the Jonestown Massacre “an American problem”.

A recent publication, A New Look at Jonestown, by elder statesman Eusi Kwayana, offers a fresh look at the mass suicide. Not surprisingly, Kwayana, a political activist, offers a Guyanese perspective on the tragedy.

Interest is generated from reading the first chapter of the 258-page book, as Kwayana interviews three survivors of the Jones Temple, one of whom wrote the foreword to the book, Laura Johnston Kohn.

The rest of the book incorporates excerpts from the writings of several Guyanese, including George Danns, Walter Rodney and Jan Carew, culminating in an analysis of the massacre by Kwayana.

What makes Kwayana’s narrative worth reading is his deliberate examination of a “tragedy in Guyana” as a “Guyanese tragedy”, while still reminding us that the tragedy involved primarily victims from the US. One scholarly excerpt comes from the work Guyanese sociologists George Danns and Lear Matthews, who consider Jones’s commune a “community-inspired self-reliance” effort coinciding with Burnham’s cooperative socialism.

Jonestown could be considered part and parcel of Burnham’s development plans, made possible by an offer of “resources and encouragement for hinterland development”, and his policy of encouraging “foreigners to settle in the interior”.

Kwayana dug deep to identify the role played by Guyanese in this tragedy. A defining theme of the book is that the tragedy had strong resemblance to other international and national events in world history. While Danns and Matthews identify the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project as an outgrowth of Burnhamism, readers are left to wonder if Jones’s commune was simply a cult or an experiment that offered broader historical lessons.

The book makes the point that the commune was a reflection of a master/slave plantation society reflective of the type found in the American South. It considers the role of religion as central to indoctrination and social control of the labour population.

Kwayana made reference to a speech by Walter Rodney, who reminded us that the Jim Jones affair remained a secretive one, with no official inquiry into the mass suicide by the Burnham regime. It was yet another dark stain on the image on the nation. In a reproduced 1978 Dayclean article, Kwayana forcefully argues that the Peoples Temple was actually a “state within a state” (a term that may have been used by top ranks in the Burnham regime), given the extent to which the Burnham regime was involved, and the level of secrecy associated with its creation.

Kwayana reminded us of some simple facts that we may have taken for granted: Jim Jones “was in full control of truth and “he embodied the media…”. This was eerily the simplicity with which the Burnham regime governed Guyana, particularly during the late 1970s, ironically, a time when Kwayana’s opposition to Burnham was strongest. He reminds us of the contempt Burnham had for the Guyanese people – at the time when Guyanese faced import bans on many essential items, the settlers at Jonestown were exempted from the country’s customs and immigration regulations.

Now domiciled in California, the area from which most of Jones’s innocent victims migrated, Kwayana found time to meet with survivors of the People’s Temple. His book offers some new insights into a national tragedy that claimed Guyana as an international pariah state.

Not embedded in pretensions or utopian theoretical approach, ‘A New Look at Jonestown’ is well worth reading, not because it was written by a politically/socially conscious Guyanese activist, but because of what it has to offer in our greater understanding of what essentially was a Guyanese national tragedy.
Sincerely,
BAYTORAM RAMHARACK