It was in May this year that Wanderlust Tours first announced its intention of mounting overnight tours to the Jonestown site. At the time the report slid by largely unremarked, but in the last two weeks or so the proposal has generated considerable debate in our letters column. It is not the only time such a proposition has been given an airing, but on the first occasion it was dismissed as being both macabre and improper.
Ms Roselyn Sewcharran of Wanderlust Tours has said in a letter to this newspaper that Jonestown is part of Guyana’s history, and at least where that is concerned she is correct. Some of our letter writers have tended to regard the tragedy of November 18, 1978 as being solely an American episode which just happened to play out on Guyanese soil. But the truth is more complex.
Jim Jones made his application to come to create a settlement in this country in 1973 through the agency of Claude Worrell, the honorary Guyanese consul in California. According to the New York Times of December 24, 1978, he came here with four members of his Temple to argue his case. The appeal of Guyana was that it was non-white and 75 per cent of his following was African-American; it was English-speaking and most important, it was socialist.
The proposal was that although the community would be supported by the economically profitable San Francisco branch, it eventually would provide subsistence from its own farm crops. The idea involved the commune coming to support 200 people, but as all the sources relate a crisis was precipitated by the importation of 800 people in 1977.
Forbes Burnham seems to have detailed Ptolemy Reid, who was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture and National Development to listen to Jones’s proposal. According to various writers he was impressed, particularly with the Temple’s socialist views, and appears to have had no reservations about recommending a group which had money, wanted to pursue agriculture and espoused a political approach not so far removed from that of the Guyana government. In addition there were the recommendations from US Democratic Senators, Congressmen and Mayors, although not Rosalynn Carter, as Mr Hamilton Green has maintained; that was a letter written later which Mr Kit Nascimento says he saw.
Burnham’s motivation for agreement has never been a secret: after failing to persuade Guyanese to settle near the border he thought that having American citizens there would act as a real disincentive to Caracas in terms of invasion. So in 1974, the Temple was granted its lease of land.
The details of how the relationship evolved, however, are not so clear. A number of local officials had dealings with the Temple, and various laws were breached. In its brief account of Guyana government involvement the group which investigated the tragedy for the US House of Representatives Committee of Foreign Affairs listed the People’s Temple being allowed to bring in items outside normal Customs procedures. These included large sums of money and guns in suitcases and false-bottomed crates, in addition, according to other sources, to the importations in the Cudjoe, Jonestown’s boat in the North-West. There was also, claimed the report, the compromising of immigration procedures, and the ‘liaisons’ between Temple women and Guyana officials, the one publicly known being that between Guyana’s US ambassador and Paula Adams.
Various US newspaper accounts following the tragedy reported interviews with anonymous Guyanese officials, some of whose concerns prior to the tragedy were overruled by central authorities, but no one has ever put together the full Guyanese side of the story. The Congressional committee was not allowed by the government here to interview Guyanese officials in the course of its investigations, and some of its allegations in this regard remain classified.
The plan Ms Sewcharran has for her tour involves identifying the socio-political factors which led to the creation and tragic end of Jonestown, its impact on global history and the lessons to be learned from it. Exactly how this would be better accomplished by shunting people around an abandoned site with commentary from a guide rather than sitting in a living room reading the voluminous literature on the subject is unclear. Whatever it is, it is not the full story from Guyana’s point of view. Presumably the Guyanese element, if there is any, might come from recollections of local people in Port Kaituma of their interactions with the group.
And at the moment there really is very little to see, other than bits of a cassava mill, pieces of the main pavilion and a rusted tractor, according to the Associated Press, which also quoted Mr Gerry Gouveia as saying, “We should reconstruct the home of Jim Jones, the main pavilion and other buildings that were there.”
Once that is done – if it is done – then it would definitely be for the purposes of tourism and its profits. But there is a distinction between facilitating the relatives and friends of those who died as well as researchers to visit the site, and transforming it into a regular tourist destination. The latter represents a standard money-making product which will be advertised, and names like ‘thanatourism’ or ‘dark tourism’ will not alter that fact.
It should be remembered too that this is not a site of murder-suicide; bar Jim Jones and his henchmen who shot themselves it is a place of mass murder. Seventy people were identified by Dr Leslie Mootoo in company with US witnesses as not drinking the cyanide-laced drink, but as having been murdered, while the children certainly could not be said to have committed suicide. But then nor could the others who drank. People who are brainwashed, threatened, lied to, sometimes beaten and sleep deprived do not take rational decisions; they were manipulated into killing themselves – it was murder by another means.
Is it an act of respect to take tourists around the site of mass murder? This is not Auschwitz, which is a memorial and a museum. There is no memorial at Jonestown, no mark of respect for those who were killed, including one or two Guyanese like the small Amerindian boy from the local area. Mr Neville Bissember came nearest to an appropriate response when he suggested a memorial at Port Kaituma Airstrip to Congressman Ryan and others who were shot there.
This principle could be extended to Jonestown, with a memorial including the names of the victims perhaps. That would be a mark of respect, which a grand tour would not be. The factors which led to Jonestown are part of US history, particularly that of California, and are best told in that setting. How the settlement functioned here is part of Guyanese history, but that is a topic for research, not a tour.
Former Congresswoman Jackie Speier, who was wounded during the shootings on the Airstrip, told KGO, an ABC News affiliate, that the proposal differed from a memorialised museum, and that it was inappropriate to “aggrandize that kind of cult activity”. She went on to say: “It’s such a bad story, such a horrible story. I don’t think you learn lessons by creating an adventure activity, wanderlust adventure!”
Wanderlust Tours might like to mull the word ‘Respect’.