SOURCE: Gurnah, Abdulrazak. “Imagining Guyana.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4866 (5 July 1996): 24.

In the following review, Gurnah discusses how Jonestown addresses broad questions of culture and freedom in the context of Guyanese history.

On November 18, 1978, in the interior of the Cooperative Socialist Republic of Guyana, over 900 American followers of the “messianic” Pastor Jim Jones died in Jonestown. Most of them took their own lives in a practised ritual suicide, drinking the Fla-Vor-Aid laced with cyanide which was given to them by the Pastor's assistants. The day before, an American Congressman and a group of Concerned Parents on missions to rescue their off-spring were ambushed and killed by Jones's followers. It was the climactic act in the duplicitous and paranoid rhetoric of racial brotherhood and socialism which had held Pastor Jones's flock in thrall. The mass suicide was the last deluded act of defiance against enslavement in the United States. Some...