Annie Dawid
speaker
147 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Annie Dawid’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
He doesn't want this article to be published because he feels like that's going to be the end of him. And he is paranoid. I mean, there's the kind of paranoia which is drug-induced and not real. And then there's also the real paranoia, which is people are investigating the church and they don't like what they see.
In 74, the People's Temple bought this land in Guyana, the former British Guyana, which is newly independent. And they want foreign investment to help them. They're a poor country. So Jones buys this land, or leases, actually, this land in the northwest part of the state near the Venezuelan border. And that border is contested. between Guyana and Venezuela.
So Guyana wants people to inhabit that part of the country, you know, which is very, very sparsely populated. So they start what's called the Jonestown Agricultural Project in 74. And eventually there's like a hundred workers there. They call them the Jonestown pioneers who go, they clear the jungle, they build this community. I mean, it's pure jungle. It's
a 24-hour boat ride from the capital of Georgetown. It's really isolated. And these builders are incredible. And they work 18-hour days building this community from scratch. And so this utopian impulse, that's very American. It was also the beginning of white America, of whites leaving England and Holland because of religious persecution.
So I really find a lot of the American utopian impulse in people's temples. So they're building that.
Yeah, true. So 74 is the start of it. Now we're 77. It's the summer. This article is starting to, you know, Jones's understanding he can't stop it from being published. So he says, I got to get out of here because he'll be prosecuted for something. He doesn't want to deal with that. And so the mass immigration to Guyana starts in the summer of 77. The article comes out in August.
So he's already gone when the article is published in the Bay Area.
Guyana is chosen for more than one reason. One is it's a socialist country under President Forbes Burnham, who is a Marxist himself. So that looks really good. On paper, they end up being corrupt like every other particular government who ends up running the show in a lot of these post-colonial governments.
There's a large Black population in Guyana, former slaves, and mixing with Indians who had been brought over as indentured servants. which is actually kind of the larger population number-wise. And there's also Native American people there, the Amer Indians. So that's the one big reason. And the other big reason is that they speak English.
So that's why they picked Guyana.
Eventually. Yes. But they are not expecting 900 people to show up all at once, which is more or less what happens in the summer camp. Of 77.
Well, they have water. Water doesn't end up being a problem, but it's not right for growing just about anything. Like there's a cassava will grow there. They have all these huge plans to, yes, to be self-supporting, and that never, ever happens. And then a lot of their experiments fail. The weather is very intense in the equatorial jungle, and there's constant rains and flooding.
And so, yeah, it's not a good place to try and be self-sufficient. And of course... They're not farmers, so they're learning everything. So it's a tough sell, but they're determined to make it work. So there's a lot of overcrowding when all those people arrive. And then by the time the article comes out, there's hardly anyone left to interview in San Francisco because they're in Guyana.
There are a skeleton staff at the temple, because their job is to keep shipping everything to Guyana to make it function. So that's a huge responsibility and very important. So when we talk about survivors from Jonestown, some of those survivors of Jonestown are the people who never went to Jonestown because they stayed in San Francisco and they were doing the work.
And one of my characters in my book is one of those people. And she is heartbroken. I mean, she's heartbroken when everybody dies, but she's also heartbroken she never got to go there. And that was a kind of common feeling amongst survivors. They lost their entire community at once, and they wish that they had been part of it, even though it was so awful, the end of it, it was still their family.
So he keeps saying there's 1,200 people. I keep running into that number, 1,200. But on the day of the massacre, 918 people die. So there were not 1200 people in Jonestown on that day. Now, another group of survivors were in Georgetown, which is the capital of Guyana. And people were constantly going to Georgetown to do things like go to the dentist.
Like there were a bunch of people at the dentist that day. There was a basketball team who was playing the Guyanese team They were in Georgetown that day. They had a Georgetown headquarters for dealing with the government. So there were people who were there all the time and dealing with customs and all the shipments, because everything that got shipped
would be shipped to the airport in Georgetown. So there's another large contingent of survivors there. So I don't know if you added all that up, if you'd get to 1,200.
Quite a bureaucracy in running the People's Temple. Lots of committees. as I have said already, it was mostly white women who were doing the running of everything. And part of Jim Jones's genius was that he understood that women had all this energy and wanted to work. And this is just kind of the early women's movement where a lot of women are very frustrated that they can't put their
their smarts and their energy into play. And he sees that as a great opportunity and nails it. So you've got this, the structure has been described as like a wheel with lots of spokes and Joneses at the hub. And so everybody's reporting to him. He has like an individual relationship with everyone. Yeah, they have committees.
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