I Remember Jonestown

I was only ten in November of 1978, but the feeling that gripped my tiny malnourished throat when I heard of the mass suicide, will stay with me until my hair turns gray.

Not many people in the West knew where Guyana was. In fact, not many Westerners knew that there was even such a place. Whereas, on the other side of the Atlantic, just above the equator in the north of the South American continent, not many Guyanese people had heard of Jim Jones. No one knew, without being told that is, where Jonestown was. But this is a different story with countless political implications.

I was at my friend’s house having lunch before heading back to school. I was a primary school pupil, in what is called fourth standard in that part of the world. My friend’s mother had the radio tuned to the lunch-time Calypso programme when there was a sudden break in the steel drum rhythm and the news reader came on. “Breaking news,” he had said. And then told of the peculiar story of how more than nine hundred people lined up and willingly drank Kool-aid which they knew was laced with deadly poison.

Of course, as a little child – a sensible one – I thought that it was most absurd. Why would any one stand in a queue to volunteer to be killed? My life as a physically and emotionally abused child was enveloped with misery and pain so it was odd for me to feel such terror at the idea of death.

I told myself that surely, it was a mistake and that the people were unaware of the Kool-aid’s deadly ingredient. But I was wrong, there were pictures in the newspapers the next day, and the next, and the next after that. They showed hundreds of murdered people lying like mere piles of dirty laundry on the ground. In my child’s mind the pictures made dozens of photocopies and filed them neatly away under “long term” memory.

There were images of families bunched together, face down in the grass, almost giving an impression of a sinister scrum. I saw pictures of dead mothers still holding equally dead babies tightly to their hearts. Some of the newspapers printed pictures of the boundless piles of shoes collected at the site after the bodies were moved. And still more on their front pages, showed little knitted booties of babies whose mothers had spoon-fed the tainted drink to their unwitting infants before swallowing a cupful themselves.