Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  ‘That made it inviolable,’ said my host. ‘Burnham wouldn’t touch it.’

  ‘So it became the centre of resistance?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose it did. We all lived in the rooms upstairs.’

  ‘And is it still the Taitts’ house?’

  ‘Yes. They fled after the assassination, so we run it for them, as a little hotel.’

  Dr Roopnaraine was sprawled in a cane chair, before a tray of untouched tea. Everything about him sprawled; the long, thin legs dangling over the armrest; the jeans and shirt slightly too big; and the boyish hank of silvery hair, flopping over his forehead. Even his stories sprawled, bounding along in immaculate tally-ho Indian. As he talked he smoked, and his hands swooped around making vapour trails, like a dogfight in front of his face. He was thrillingly articulate but not always easy to follow. Sometimes we were fighting in Grenada, then we were at Cambridge (picking up a cricket blue) followed by Cornell, then a childhood spent with Burnham (and parents who were ‘through and through Bolsheviks’), and then we’d be back near the present, setting fire to the sugar cane or running a college, or making films, and researching the history of art.

  I asked if he ever regretted the resort to violence.

  Roopnaraine hesitated. ‘No,’ he said, ‘democracy had failed.’

  For the rest of teatime we lost ourselves in revolt. At times it all sounded weirdly parochial; Roopnaraine had been at the same school as not only Burnham but also Cheddi, the head of the army, the man who tortured him in prison, and at the same time as an awesome Pan-Africanist called Dr Walter Rodney. (‘Politics in Guyana,’ he said wryly, ‘is still very much a family affair’.) But in another sense it all looked like something new, a revolution in reverse. Instead of the masses taking up arms, it was the tiny, intellectual élite. In 1979 they joined up under an incongruous name – the Working People’s Alliance – and began to set fire to the cane. ‘Fire terrified Burnham,’ said Roopnaraine happily, ‘and he started to lose his edge …’

  In front of us, the tea had gone cold, so we ordered tumblers of rum.

  ‘And what did you do then?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I wanted an armed insurrection! What a fuck-up. We’d been stockpiling timers, explosives and arms, right here in the room upstairs. I thought the army would come out and join us, but Cheddi disagreed and argued – on Leninist principles – that without the army the coup would fail …’

  Roopnaraine shook his head, smiled and lit another cigarette. ‘So anyway,’ he went on, ‘that July, we burned down the PNC’s headquarters and the Ministry of National Development, and then, a few days later, we were all arrested …’

  The gang of scholars hadn’t fared well in the days and months that followed. Although they all eventually wriggled out of the charges, several of them were murdered, some fled abroad and others disappeared. Their movement began to fall apart. Lorlene told me that none of them had ever married; the WPA was their life. Of the three vaguely Marxist parties that have dominated Guyanese politics, it was probably the most intelligent, as well as the most embracing and the most out of touch. But now it had almost gone. It had no money and no MPs, and only a figurehead in Rupert Roopnaraine. With his reputation for almost inhuman honesty, he was the éminence grise of the Guyanese left, as well as its enfant terrible.

  ‘Tell me about the assassination,’ I said.

  In Guyana, all the most memorable murders happen outside the Camp Street jail. I’d often passed it, on the way to somewhere else. At one end of Camp Street itself was an empty space where the ministry had stood – before the scholars burned it down – and at the other was a steel fortress, the length of a block. Although it looked like some vast extraterrestrial biscuit tin, this was the city jail, mounted with a thick black fuzz of razor wire and arc lights. Occasionally, I’d see women standing outside, bellowing through the tin, and then – from inside – I’d hear faint voices in reply.

  But it was not a place to hang around. There were even coils of wire across the street. Lorlene once told me they’d been there since the great break-out of 2002. A gang calling themselves Five for Freedom had somehow escaped and then used machine guns to blast a path across the city. ‘It was like a film,’ she said, ‘I saw schoolchildren running for their lives, and a man just firing wildly down the street. After that, Guyana never felt quite the same …’

  But the jail had seen atrocity before. One day in June 1980 a car pulled up and parked on the other side of the prison. Inside was the great Pan-Africanist Dr Walter Rodney, along with his brother Donald. There was also another man, a soldier called Sergeant Smith, in a house nearby with a triggering device. The Rodneys talked for a moment and then the car exploded. Donald was left with a large shard of glass lolling from his throat, and Walter lost most of his head. It seems odd to think of all this as merely a ‘fuck-up’. Africans everywhere had been deprived of a champion. Some 35,000 people attended the funeral, and protests came in from all over the socialist world. Burnham the bomber! Ruthless Burnham! In all the accounts I’d ever read of Walter’s death, he’d been killed by a radio set in which Sergeant Smith had secretly hidden a tiny bomb. Even the Encyclopaedia Britannica has him assassinated like this, with an exploding walkie-talkie.

  ‘In actual fact,’ said Roopnaraine, ‘there was never any walkie-talkie …’

  ‘So the bomb was yours?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, much to his own surprise, ‘yes, it was.’

  ‘And I don’t suppose it was meant to go off?’

  ‘No. There was no explosive in the device. It was simply a wooden box with an electronic receiver. The activity was intended as a loyalty test for Smith, who, it later emerged, had a background in electronics. It turned out he was an agent and that he’d somehow succeeded in loading the device with explosive. Next thing we know, BOOM! Walter’s dead.’

  ‘And Donald?’

  ‘He’s in a terrible state but we got him back here, found a friendly surgeon and performed an operation right where we’re sitting now.’

  ‘And he survived?’

  ‘As good as new,’ said Roopnaraine, and he smiled, as though insurgency was just like cricket, except without the blue.

  It was time to leave Georgetown and begin my forays into the rest of Guyana, otherwise known as the bush.

  I was sorry to be leaving. Somehow the city had created the illusion of familiarity. Within a few weeks I’d acquired somewhere to live and a few friends, and I had a rough idea of where everything was. But more than this, there was something about the city – its breezy architecture, its see-through homes, its open arms and its open drains – that made me feel I understood it, and that here was a place with nothing to hide.

  Even at the time, I realised this was folly. There probably isn’t a city in the world that’s so physically transparent and yet so mentally opaque. Even those living in Georgetown didn’t really understand it. They didn’t know who owned anything, how the rich got rich, who was behind the politicians or who was running the country. Some thought America called all the shots, others that Britain was about to resume control (in return for carbon credits). When the Minister of Agriculture was mown down by a cadre of commandos, it didn’t seem to surprise anyone that the inquiry had ground to a halt. People had got used to mysteries. Many still hoped that, one day, a revolution would sweep it all away. But how many decades had they waited? In the meantime they’d busy themselves in the struggle for work or fuel or a telephone that worked, or in the search for simple facts. As Shiva Naipaul once wrote, ‘In British Guiana it is impossible to find out the truth about any major thing.’

  In retrospect, I only caught occasional glimpses of hidden Georgetown, usually in hotels. Just as Cara Lodge had been the centre of revolt, so the Pegasus was now the centre of power. I never went there without seeing some or other government minister lunching with large Canadians. Everyone had bodyguards, and with so much shiny cloth and hired muscle it could sometimes seem like the court of a medieval
king. Once I managed to talk to one of the oil men (or was he gold? I forget). He told me that he flew in every week and that he never left the lobby without his special forces. ‘Guyana is complex,’ he warned, ‘there are wheels within wheels.’

  Another hotel with a window on the world within was The Tower. It too ought to have been a hotspot of political intrigue. In an earlier incarnation it had been Georgetown’s finest hotel (and even Evelyn Waugh had stayed there, making it, briefly, the headquarters of his contempt), but then the fires had reduced it to ash, and a tube of concrete had erupted in its place. It sometimes seemed that this strong, new profile had made it a hotspot of something else. The lobby was satisfyingly perfunctory and anonymous, and housed a large condom machine with a notice: ‘ACT SAFE. ROCK AND UNROLL.’

  I only stayed there once. Although few guests ever seemed to use the public areas, I did meet three unlikely English pedlars, sitting in the bar. They said they enjoyed travel books, and were making their way round the world selling England football shirts and sometimes a little cocaine. None of this seemed at all odd at the time, and soon I was joining in and throwing back the rum. ‘Here’s to Waugh!’ hooted Dezza, a boy the colour of carrots. ‘A toast to the grumpy old bugger!’ It wasn’t much of a salute, but then, as an old Waugh-haunt, The Tower wasn’t much of a successor. As the bar staff slithered quietly out of sight, I made as though to go. But a powerful orange hand caught me by the arm. ‘We’ll see you again,’ said Dezza, ‘you’ll find us at the Appleby Horse Fair.’

  I then clambered off, up through six storeys of concrete. My room, somewhere near the top, was all white and metallic like a fridge and had a mirror along one wall. I remember thinking how novel it was, the quiet and the cold. For a long time I just lay there, pondering the mysterious fragments of another Georgetown day.

  Almost exactly thirty years earlier another guest had lain here, somewhere on this floor, contemplating the ill-fitting pieces that made up her life.

  She was convinced she was being hunted down by men with automatic rifles and bazookas, and perhaps she was. In her terror she slept in the bath and made the desk staff swear they’d never seen her. But she was not a person it was easy to forget. Even in her state of nervous disintegration she still had about her a smouldering beauty and an air of volatile youth. Perhaps that’s why no one believed her when she talked about the guns, the punishments and the hundreds of people about to die. To anyone that met her, Debbie Layton was just a flaky Californian – callow, bush-crazy and probably drugged. She would fly home the next day, and The Tower would be rid of her for ever.

  But Debbie Layton was more resilient than anyone imagined. True, her life was confused, but its components had left her resourceful and resistant to defeat. She’d survived a neurotic Berkeley childhood, years of self-harm, a spell in a bike gang and a period of exile at a boarding school in Yorkshire. Then came the cult. Seven years earlier, in 1971, she thought she’d stumbled on her destiny, in the shape of a preacher with oily black hair and full wet lips. At the age of eighteen she gave the Revd Jim Jones everything she had, including her virginity. He took it while they were riding along in his church’s bus, and then he enjoyed her again in a public toilet. It wasn’t the first time Jones had helped himself to his flock, and soon the press were on his trail. As the allegations began to entangle him, Jones moved out to one of the remotest areas of Guyana in 1977, along with his church, ‘The People’s Temple’. In December of that year Debbie Layton followed, and then – six months later – she was back in Georgetown, hollow-eyed and running for her life.

  The cult, she claimed, was on the brink of catastrophe, and of course she was right. Through all the shards of her own broken youth she’d somehow spotted the impending disaster.

  The calamity she’d predicted would not be long in coming. A few months later, in November 1978, Jones’s private Promised Land would fail in a way that the world had never seen before. The Jonestown Massacre, as it’s now known, would wipe out an entire community and kill over 900 people. Aside from acts of belligerence and natural calamity, it would be the biggest single loss of life in modern times. People didn’t know what to call it. Suicide? Genocide? Or both? For years the slaughter would generate films, books, investigations, inquiries, elections and countless theories, but it has never been fully explained – and probably never will be. These days, it’s all things to all pundits: a conspiracy, a collective failure of mental health or the end of the psychedelic era.

  But to the Guyanese the massacre was something different again. The Wall Street Journal once described it as ‘the most famous moment in Guyanese history’, and no one really disputed this. Thirty years ago the eyes of the entire world had settled on Guyana. But as well as being its most famous moment, Jonestown was also its most forgettable and its most forgotten. There was no memorial, and now even the facts were vague. As Rupert Roopnaraine warned me, ‘Jonestown has no real part to play in Guyanese history. It was an American affair.’

  So once again Georgetown’s mental undergrowth had triumphed. Jonestown was now almost mystery, or at least a place best forgotten. For some reason this made me more determined than ever, and so I made a decision: before going anywhere else in Guyana, I would head for Jonestown first.

  Most people were appalled at the idea of my trip to Jonestown. It wasn’t just the name that made them shudder. Any trip that involved the Interior was unappealing. To most Townies, what happened beyond the city limits was beyond the pale – a vast, malarial dystopia of stinking swamps, thorns, bandits, bugs the size of rats and dark carnivorous forest. ‘You gonna find nothing, Man,’ they’d say, ‘the bush swallow everything. You can’t see you hand in front of you face …’

  The girl at the travel agent was a little more optimistic. Jonestown was no longer marked on the map, but we could find a nearby village. Between there and Georgetown were 250 miles of solid green – which I presumed was forest – threaded with nameless rivers. There were no railways at all, and the roads heading north petered out shortly after the city. There used to be a ship, said the girl. It headed up the coast to Mabaruma, but it was a dangerous voyage and perhaps the ship no longer ran. The only other option, she said, was to fly to the old port. Eventually she found me a plane, and I bought a ticket. After that, I’d have to finish my journey by river, another fifty or sixty miles.

  Lorlene was intrigued by all these arrangements. ‘I remember the People’s Temple,’ she said, ‘they had the house next door to ours.’

  On my last day she drove me over to her childhood home. It was out in Lamaha Gardens, a little suburb that had once been affluent. The Jameses’ house was right on the edge of the sugar cane, but it was not what it had been before. Now the paint was peeling, and there were people asleep in the grass. Lorlene said nothing but drove on, grinding over the potholes until we came to the Temple’s house. It was a shapeless yellowish villa with a tall metal fence and a few blank, meshed windows, leaking tropical mould.

  ‘It always looked unlived-in …’ said Lorlene absently.

  We both peered up at the windows, as though expecting to see Jones’s people inside, manning the radios and cooking up plots. Despite its aura of emptiness, the villa had been the Georgetown base of the People’s Temple for several years. From here they’d ordered the guns and cyanide, and had dispatched supple girls to politicians’ beds. It was here too that the orders of the Revd Jones had found expression, crackling over the ether. When, that day in November, he’d issued his final command, it was received here by his last disciple and bleakly obeyed. Sleepless, brainwashed and devoted, Linda Amos climbed the stairs to the room with the blank, meshed windows and carefully drew the blinds. Then she took her children and cut their tiny, soft throats before turning the knife on herself.

  It was these last details that troubled me most of all. If Jones had exercised power like this over the airwaves, what sort of power had he exercised in the jungle, hundreds of miles to the north? Even more troubling, how much of this m
alevolence still lingered on, and where would it end?

  2

  THE TOWN OF JONES

  In this foreign and forbidding place it was impossible to have a sense of forward or backward. Everything looked the same – green, brown and dense. I came to realise that the jungle served as our prison bars, a barrier we couldn’t punctuate.

  Deborah Layton, Seductive Poison

  Take our life from us! We got tired. We didn’t commit suicide. We committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting against the conditions of an inhuman world.

  The last speech of Revd Jim Jones

  ABOUT HALF-WAY THROUGH THE FLIGHT I began to wonder if all this was a good idea. Down below, the landscape began to change. For a while there were the comforting strips of sugar. They looked like the spines of books, stacked deep inland and then all the way up the coast. Then the patterns ended, with the mouth of a river almost as wide as the English Channel. It was the Essequibo, looking as though it had drained the continent of silt. After that, the land darkened to a sort of stygian green, with veins of silvery-black. There was no order about this, nor any sign of life. It was just an uneven vegetative darkness, as though the land had swallowed the night.

  Perhaps the Townies were right: I’d find nothing. Perhaps I’d just wander off the airstrip only to be lost in the gruesome prickly dark. I’d meet strange people, mad with damp and sores, but they’d never have heard of Jones. Then I’d get diarrhoea and yaws, and my skin would begin to weep. After four days of this, blundering around looking for the light, I’d eventually emerge in a clearing. By then I’d no longer care about Jonestown, and I’d look like Debbie Layton: hollow-eyed, panicky and howling for a plane.