Wild Coast Page 7

  I tried to reassure myself, but nothing seemed to work. I was travelling to a place I wasn’t sure existed, and which had once been the epitome of despair. I’d never met anyone who’d been there, and now here I was in a tiny plane with a tractor tyre, two cases of rum and a box of brand new Bibles. Even my fellow passengers were a discouraging sight. One was a pork-knocker – or gold prospector – and was dressed in shorts and orange rubber boots, and carried a pump-action shotgun. Another had with him a little bird, about the size of a grape, which he chatted to all the way. Meanwhile, the woman next to me, who was already flooded with sweat, peeled open the Old Testament and started murmuring chunks of Leviticus.

  ‘Where you going?’ said the birdman.

  ‘Jonestown,’ I said, without thinking.

  ‘You won’t find their gold,’ he grinned. ‘They had bunkers underground.’

  My heart sank. Already I could feel myself encircled in coils of local myth. Jonestown was famous for this. To survive it, I’d brought with me my own version of the story, assembled back in London. It included several hand-drawn maps, a hefty bundle of notes and dozens of grainy pictures. I’d even transcribed parts of ‘The Death Tapes’ – the recordings Jones made as he ordered his people to die. None of this would tell me what went on there now – but at least it was better than the birdie version.

  As man and finch began to tweet, I pulled out my notes and started to read.

  In the short, peculiar life of Jim Jones what stands out most is his relentless metamorphosis. The old coverings are constantly falling away as the new ones form in their place. By the end he even acquires a blank insectile gaze, and a voice that clatters and whirs. Perhaps he knows where the transformations will inevitably lead. Not that it frightens him. ‘Death is nothing!’ he’ll be heard to say. It’s merely the shedding of a used-up layer.

  Ever since he was born, in 1931, Jones has been wriggling out of whatever he was before. His family are descended from Native Americans. They are poor and live in Indiana, and Jones’s father is a Klansman and an angry veteran, enfeebled by poison gas. This, Jones decides, is not the life for him. As a child he plays the preacher, and by the age of twenty-two he’s established a church of his own. Jones likes the multicoloured skins of the poor, which seem to give him a certain beauty. By 1963 he’s head of the human rights commission, and his disciples assume a new name, the People’s Temple Full Gospel Church. Two years later he shrugs off Indiana and moves to California. According to an article he’s read – in Esquire – it’s the only place that’ll survive if there’s ever a nuclear war.

  As he waits for the war that won’t happen, another change occurs. The Prophet, as he now calls himself, acquires some of the powers of God. He tells his followers that he’s the reincarnation of Lenin and Christ, and soon he’s performing wonders with chicken giblets and hauling out dangerous tumours. By the end of the ’60s, no one knows who loves him more: the politicians or the poor. Now the dispossessed are giving the Temple everything they’ve got: their children, their trust and all their possessions. In time the cult amasses over $10 million, in fifteen different accounts. Even the Revd Jones is surprised: ‘Everything I touch,’ he thrills, ‘turns to gold.’

  But soon there are no more layers to shed, and the sheen begins to fade. The Prophet now has to colour his hair and thicken his sideburns with an eyebrow pencil. He also finds that he has to rekindle his potency with the youngest girls and steady his hand with Scotch. Virgins like Debbie Layton are made to promise that they begged him into bed, and that they’d never seen a man so big. As the Prophet’s powers dwindle, he even begins to press them on the boys. This only excites the interest of the police. One day he finds himself at the back of a Hollywood theatre, grappling with a fluffer (who works for the LAPD). He’s accused of lewd conduct, a pitiful charge for a man so close to God.

  So it is that the coverings begin to crack. But as they do so, the cult that surrounds Jones seems only to strengthen. He calls his followers ‘darlings’, and then tells them they’ll never leave his church alive. Sex is often the only hold he has over people, so he keeps them all on film. Now there are always guns around, and curious ceremonies, to bless the Father’s fetishes. Look at Idi Amin, he says, ‘we should learn to emulate his wild actions’. Soon ‘The Cause’ will have its own fleet of buses and its own little army, which goes training in the hills.

  It’s now time for a final transformation. By 1977 California has become hostile, and it’s time for the Prophet to fly. He’s already bought a piece of Promised Land: 27,000 acres of distant Guyanese forest. There he will rule like some mystic king. In his eyes this country’s perfect; it’s been shunned by the world, and its officials are now starving, and candidly corrupt. They’ll do anything for money, or a night with a teenage girl. Unsurprisingly, nothing seems to function, except a ministry of thugs. Even better, Guyana is cranky and socialist, and run by a man called Burnham who thinks he’s an African chief.

  Late that summer the planes are all block-booked. Over 900 believers will fly out to Georgetown and then transfer to ships. Among them are both the hopeless and the hopeful: fundamentalists, former addicts, charismatics, ex-cons, Vietnam veterans, hundreds of African-Americans and a handful of white progressives. These include a former CBS television presenter, Mike Prokes, and a woman who escaped the Nazi death camps. She’s there with her son Larry – who will eventually start shooting people – and her daughter, Debbie Layton. Finally, there’s Jones himself. He looks puffy and distracted. All that sustains him now are faith and voodoo, and powerful draughts of prescription painkillers.

  Finally they get to Mabaruma. After two days at sea, there’s relief as they clamber ashore. But what no one knows is that this is an act of metamorphosis. It’s a process that can never be reversed, and has only one conclusion.

  Mabaruma was not quite what I – or the faithful – had expected. While it wasn’t exactly a Land of Milk and Honey, nor was it dark and carnivorous.

  From the airstrip I got a ride to the village, which was built high above the forest on an enormous whale of green. Up here, running along the spine, was an avenue of stately rubber trees and a pleasing sprawl of orchards, paddocks, tiny wooden farms and tobacco-coloured cows. There was also a miniature hospital, an ambulance without any tyres and a shop that sold nerve tonic, barbed wire and jeans. It was run by a man called Mr Chan A Sue, who was part Amerindian and part Chinese. He told me that this was once the garden of Guyana and that every week the ships had left stuffed to the gunnels with fruit.

  These days the fruit ships no longer called, and the great sleep that had overwhelmed Mabaruma was now in its third decade. The paint had peeled, the machines had stopped and the mangoes plopped – unclaimed – into the grass. I stayed at the government guesthouse, which had an ancient bulldozer outside, nesting in the leaves. The evening meal was served at lunchtime, and then everyone went home. I ate with the local doctor, who happened to be Cuban. He hadn’t understood anyone for months and almost wept at the sound of Spanish. The garden that he described sounded more like Eden than Guyana: idyllic, lonely and haunted by snakes. ‘I see a lot of people with bites,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘and most of them die.’

  It wasn’t just snakes that made people mawkish. Across the road was the police house, quietly flapping apart in the breeze. There was always a drunkard on the porch, and once I asked him if he remembered the people of Jonestown. He fixed me with a meaty red eye, ‘White boy,’ he rasped, ‘only one’s thing is certain: we all is going to die.’

  Then a corporal appeared, and I asked her the same. She had nervous, pretty eyes like a fox, and her stripe was fixed to her sleeve with a pin. ‘They was lovely people,’ she said, ‘they had a band, and they often came here and sang. Right here, under the trees. Their girls was always beautiful. Beautiful. I can’t believe they’re gone.’

  From the top of the guesthouse, I could just see Venezuela. It was hard to tell exactly where the trees lost their English nam
es and where the Spanish ones began. The doctor said the border was ten kilometres away, but that no one ever went out there except ‘piratas y contrabandistas’. We spent ages peering down into the jungle. There are few frontiers in South America that have tempted so much war, and perhaps we expected to see a patrol, or a little army on the move. Instead, all we heard were the monkeys and the call of a screaming piha.

  But people still worried about the Venezuelans. Many felt that one day their rich, hot-blooded neighbours would come pouring through the forest, armed to the teeth. It was well known that Venezuelan schoolchildren were taught that over half of Guyana was theirs, and that clawing it back was a matter of national duty. Caracas was always threatening them. In the 1890s the issue had brought Britain and America – for the last time – almost to the brink of conflict. Eventually the tension between imperialism and the Monroe Doctrine had been resolved by the Tsar. But it wasn’t the end. The row flared again in the 1960s and ’70s, with occasional exchanges of gunfire, and it has smouldered ever since.

  Some think Washington was behind these spats, trying to humiliate Burnham (better Venezuelan than Marxist, went the thinking at the time). But if it’s true, Burnham outwitted them. He’d always wanted some sort of leverage over the United States. Then into his lap fell Jones. This kinky, drug-befuddled crackpot not only had guns and a bank full of money, but was also willing to live in the benighted north-west and place thousands of vulnerable Americans right in the path of the enemy’s army.

  For the Amerindians of Guiana, the arrival of outsiders has often spelt disaster. To the first Europeans, their women were exotic and easy. (Illustration credit 2.2)

  Guyana opened its arms and let the Temple in.

  From here my trip upriver felt like a journey backwards through the Amerindian past. To begin with, everything felt reassuringly contemporary. I walked down off the hill to Mabaruma’s port, known as Kumaka. It had a long street of bright red earth, with a few stalls selling contraband from Venezuela, mostly shotguns and beer. Several people still remembered the Temple. They’d sold embroidery here and kept a lodge called the Dewdrop Inn. One of the Indian traders wished me luck finding the gold and slipped me a can of illegal beer. ‘Look out for my cousin,’ he told me. ‘Lost all his fingers in the Jonestown sawmill, but he knows where everything is.’

  Along the river was a waterfront, made of timber and zinc. Here I met Ivan, an Arawak boatman, who had thick, square hands, long blue hair and a canoe with a powerful engine. He could take me as far as Port Kaituma, he said, first along this river – the Uruca – and then the Barima and Kaituma. It was about fifty miles, and we’d leave as soon as he had fuel.

  As I waited on the wharf, I began to get a sense of the past closing in. First of all a large blue-haired family appeared, with an ancient sewing machine. The children, who were all naked, swooped off the woodwork like swallows and flapped around in the water for a while, until a boat like an old tree trunk appeared, and they all climbed in and paddled off. Then suddenly there was an old man next to me, inspecting my face very closely. Eventually he spoke: ‘You got glasses. I’d like you to give them to me.’ I explained that I couldn’t see properly without them, and he explained that he’d never seen properly at all. This, however, had never stopped him making canoes, one a week, chopped from a tree.

  Then Ivan reappeared, and soon we were soaring along between two ribbons of forest. To begin with, there were occasional Arawak farms: a canoe, a tiny, painted house and a plot of neat little vegetables coaxed from the edge of the jungle. But then the river narrowed and darkened. The water here was black and inert, like tarnished silver, and, above it, the morphos seemed to flop around as though they were caught in molten metal. Here the people too were different, glimpsed through the trees. They had narrow, roasted faces and knots of dusty hair. At first, I waved but they just stared back, as though they’d seen nothing at all.

  ‘They’re Warau,’ said Ivan, and I suddenly understood.

  The Warau were famously different, like a link with a long-lost age. It’s said they gave mankind its first dugout, and would probably give it its last. In hundreds of years they’d hardly changed at all. Although it’s likely they were the first Amerindians to encounter Europeans, they were also the most resistant. They’d never been persuaded to work and had no interest in learning the language of others, or in the world beyond their own. For centuries they’d been merely a vessel for everyone else’s contempt. ‘They just Bucks,’ said Ivan, ‘dirty, lazy Bucks!’

  But it was their simplicity that had probably saved them. There were now about 3,000 Warau living in these swamps. Even their huts had a pared-down, essential feel. They were just stacks of branches and woven grass straddling the water. There were no crops, no ornaments and no discernible gods. Traditionally, the bodies of the dead were stripped down by the piranhas, then daubed with ochre and hung inside the hut. For all I knew, the Warau still did this, and the bones were their only possessions. That’s how they’d survived: by having nothing of their own that anyone else could possibly want.

  The experience of the other Amerindians hadn’t always been so simple.

  To begin with, all seemed well. At this end of the Guianas there was little resistance to the Europeans, who’d often assumed that the natives had been provided for their pleasure. Even the things explorers took home – berbekots, kanoas, hamakas, and marákas (barbecues, canoes, hammocks and maracas) – seemed to suggest an easy life of indolence and leisure. The men too made good souvenirs, and there are records of the ‘Guianians’ serving not only the English Tudors but also the court of the Medicis.

  But most pleasing of all were the women, who were biddable and plump. ‘Whoever lives among them,’ wrote one early adventurer, ‘had need to be the owner of no less than Joseph’s continency, not at least to covet their embraces.’ Even the good Sir Walter Raleigh found his continence severely tested. (‘I have seldom seen a better favoured woman,’ he pants, ‘she was of good stature, with black eyes, fat of body …’) Before long the Europeans were lavishing the Amerindians with their appreciation. It is now widely believed that, in return, the Amerindians had another innovation for their guests: Europe’s first cases of syphilis.

  Then came sugar, and everything changed. By the early seventeenth century the Dutch were gathering up the natives and trying to make them work. But it failed. Like the Warau today, the Amerindians would rather die than do what they were told. They wouldn’t even work for baubles and periwigs, and so the import of Africans began. Only then did the Amerindians have a role, as manhunters and captors of runaway slaves. In 1686 it became illegal to enslave Caribs and Arawaks, and for the next century and a half they became a minor aristocracy, just below the whites.

  None of this bode well for the emancipation of slaves. In 1834 Africans were suddenly in the interior, scraping out farms and looking for gold. Even now the Amerindians fear them for their size and their strength, and their potential for revenge. As the new population began to sprawl inland, so did the smallpox. By 1900 the population of indigenous Guianese was down to 18,000, a fraction of what it had been before. The survivors were those that lived in the swamps and the mountains, or three weeks’ journey inland. But they were still like vagrants in their hunting grounds, despised by those that worked.

  Then came the age of the museum. For much of the twentieth century the Amerindians have lived like specimens, preserved in their own domain. It was made illegal to visit them, and they all became wards of the Crown. Sex with an Amerindian was now a crime, like the seduction of a child. It wasn’t quite what the tribes had wanted, but at least they began to revive. There are now 45,000 Amerindians living in nine different groups. In fact, it’s the only section of Guyanese society whose numbers are increasing.

  But the modern world is still fraught with danger. In the last fifty years the Amerindians have had to cope with drug gangs, illegal logging, mercury poisoning (from the gold mines) and a new and virulent plague. Ivan explained:
‘The big thing just now is HIV. The girls go to the camps, and they works with the miners, and then they comes back here. If one of our men dies, then, in our culture, his brother must take on his wife – and so him die too.’

  The dangers have constantly changed. In 1977 there was an altogether different threat to the Amerindians of the north-west. It was the beautiful people, with their embroidery and cookies. Come and join us, they’d say, we’ve found paradise on Earth.

  After several hours Ivan dropped me at Port Kaituma. From here it was only seven miles to Jonestown, over the ridge and out in the bush. ‘But watch out,’ he warned, ‘there’s bad people around.’

  I thanked him and smiled bravely. But it was not how I felt. I realised that, the nearer I got to Jonestown, the more insistent the warnings became. It was as though I was now closing in on the target, and some internal radar was beginning to beep. As far as people downriver were concerned, Port Kaituma was a sort of tropical Gomorrah, a place of whores and smugglers, and fortunes made in gold. The only people who ever came up here were the mad, the desperate and those on the run. It seemed that these were the Guyanese badlands, and now, here I was, wondering what to do next.

  I took a deep breath, and clambered onto a pier. Around me was a small black inlet, cluttered with stilted slums. The mud stank and made the air feel oily and burned. I followed a path of planks that led upwards through the stilts. Many years earlier Amerigo Vespucci had seen huts like this – also Warau – and had called the place Venezuela, because they reminded him of Venice. Clearly he’d never seen Port Kaituma.

  This was no Venice. As for the town at the top of the bank, it wasn’t even remotely Venetian. For a start, I could see right through it, along a furrow of crimson mud. It looked as though something huge had plunged through the shacks, scraping up a layer of stalls and cardboard and starving dogs before vanishing into the forest. Then I discovered what the plunging object had been. Through the mud ran long, broken trails of silvery metal. It was all that remained of a railway line that had closed in 1968. Most of the wagons were still there, scattered along the ridge. A few were inhabited, and – where they’d clustered together – this was the centre of town.