Jonestown, Demerara

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For other places with the same name, see Jonestown (disambiguation).

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Jonestown is a small village in Demerara, Guyana.

Jonestown stands on the low coastal plain of Guyana, whereon that country's population and agriculture are concentrated, at a place roughly 30 km southeasterly from Georgetown and near to the lower reaches of the Mahaica River. This is within the historical bounds of Demerara, one of the original, smaller colonies that were joined to become British Guiana, which took the name Guyana upon gaining its independence. More narrowly, traditional geographic terms put Jonestown in the Mahaica district of the East Coast of Demerara — East Coast Demerara or just ECD, for short, in any case meaning that part of Demerara east of the Demerara River and facing the Atlantic Ocean. Thus, when making its location explicit, the village tends to be called "Jonestown, Mahaica" or "Jonestown, Mahaica, ECD", even today, although by current Guyanese administrative regions it is in Demerara-Mahaica.

Jonestown has existed since the 1840s, at the latest. Probably it was one of the many country villages that sprang up in British Guiana in the wake of the ending of slavery there, as plantation-bound patterns of settlement and livelihood broke down among the freedmen. (The slaves were freed in two steps. In 1834, slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire, and in 1838, the transitional period of obligatory but paid servitude, called apprenticeship, ended).

Lewis Osborne Inniss, the Trinidadian writer and folklorist (a druggist, by profession), was born in Jonestown in 1848.^[1]

Jonestown, together with nearby areas along the lower courses of the Mahaica and other rivers of northeastern Guyana, has suffered from flooding during the wet season in the early years of the 21st century.

This Jonestown must not be confused with the Jonestown of the 1978 mass murder-and-suicide by members of the Peoples Temple cult. That other place, the communal settlement founded by the cult in the mid-1970s but promptly abandoned by its few survivors after the 1978 incident, and completely deserted since the early 1980s, was also in Guyana. It was in an altogether different part of Guyana, though, and the two Jonestowns share their name by pure happenstance. Jonestown, Demerara, has no ties with that extinct cult. Although it is as little-known as the erstwhile cult settlement is notorious, historically, for all but a few years it has been the only settled place in Guyana named Jonestown, as it is today.