An Unbeliever’s View of the Jonestown Massacre

On November 18, 1978, more than nine hundred members of the Peoples Temple died at Jonestown, the agricultural settlement they had founded in a remote part of northern Guyana. Many, in answering the call to “revolutionary suicide,” drank Fla-Vor-Aid laced with cyanide; others who resisted were forcibly dosed. But nearly all of the congregants had ended up here, thousands of miles from home, because of Jim Jones. Fiery and charismatic, Jones established what would become the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in the mid-nineteen-fifties, preaching a belief system that combined Christian millenarianism with visions of socialist uplift. He was particularly popular among African Americans, using the pulpit to argue for integration and social justice. Like many outsiders of mid-century America, eventually the Temple headed West; Jones and his followers would eventually find a home in San Francisco. For a while, they were known for their commitment to community work and to racial equality, and also for a willingness to show up at protests and support comrades in need.

The founding of the Jonestown settlement in Guyana, in the mid-seventies, served two purposes. Jones’s erratic, autocratic leadership had begun attracting negative publicity in the United States; he wanted to relocate the church somewhere free from prying eyes. His believers hoped to start something radical and new, and, for a time, they felt they had succeeded; stories circulated of Jonestown as an agrarian, communal paradise. But the day-to-day reality of life under Jones’s violent, coercive rule was far bleaker, prompting relatives of Temple members to demand an investigation. On that horrific day in November, the congressman Leo Ryan was wrapping up an uneventful fact-finding visit to Jonestown, during which several people had requested to return to the U.S. He agreed to take the defectors with him on his return flight. As they waited to leave at a nearby airstrip, they were ambushed by gunmen, sent by Jones, who killed Ryan, three journalists, and a defector from the Temple, and wounded others. Jones then commanded his worshippers to take their own lives. More than nine hundred people died that day. Almost immediately, the massacre became a deeply symbolic event.

Many writers travelled to Jonestown to survey the shambles and determine whether this was a utopian experiment gone astray or a madman’s fever dream destined to fail. Shiva Naipaul was among them. He was thirty-three, the author of two well-regarded novels, and a journalist interested in questions of belonging. Naipaul was not a believer by nature. “Anything was possible,” he remarked about the social movements of the late sixties and the seventies—and he did not mean this as an endorsement.

Going to Jonestown felt like a homecoming of sorts. Naipaul grew up in Trinidad, a descendant of Indian indentured laborers who were recruited in the late eighteen-hundreds. He and his brother, V.S., didn’t fit neatly within British hierarchy, which still defined the class structure (and ambitions) of the colonies in the Caribbean. But their alienation did not radicalize them the way it would others, and they retained a belief in the privilege and status conferred by, say, an Oxford education. It’s often said that V. S. Naipaul’s condescending depiction of Black characters was a by-product of this pedigree. Both men were interested in questions of freedom and the perspective from the periphery, but they didn’t share the era’s desire for liberation.