Paradise Lost: Jonestown, Guyana, and African American Repatriation in the 1970s

During the early- to mid 1970s, a host of African-American activists, artists, and refugees from racial oppression came to regard the Caribbean nation of Guyana as a sanctuary from state repression and faltering social movements back home. Guyana’s image as a Pan-African and socialist mecca for the Americas was highly improbable. Yet the hope of U.S. Pan Africanists for a socialist “land base” in the western hemisphere came to rest briefly on the underdeveloped nation. Guyana’s appeal stemmed from the blend of black nationalism and Pan Africanism and the fusion of optimism and despair that marked the latter stages of the Black Power movement in North America. The handful of black American expats who attempted to resettle in Guyana during this period were not just looking to escape harsh economic and political realities in the U.S. They were also engaged in a search for fulfillment—a quest for self-government and true social belonging. However, the black left utopia of the English-speaking Caribbean proved short-lived. The Guyanese state—a self-proclaimed cooperative socialist republic—degenerated over the course of the 1970s, highlighting both the insidious nature of neocolonialism and the pitfalls of the Pan African ideal. Guyana’s role in the radical imaginary of the post-civil rights era illustrates black America’s romance with the modern nation-state, its yearning for a viable counterforce to U.S. imperialism, and the tragic convergence of those two impulses.