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We have to go as one, we want to live as People’s Temple, or end it. We have chosen. It is finished.”

These are some of the words found in an unsigned suicide note titled “Last Words” written by one of the 909 people who killed themselves in the largest mass suicide in modern history in Jonestown, Guyana on November 18, 1978.

Elissa Haney on the website infoplease sheds more light on the macabre event.

According to her report, The Jonestown cult (officially named the “People’s Temple”) was founded in the United States in 1955 by Indianapolis preacher James Warren Jones who had no formal theological training, but based his liberal ministry on a combination of religious and socialist philosophies.

In 1977, Jones and many of his followers relocated to the South American country of Guyana in a place they named Jonestown, located on a tract of land the People’s Temple had purchased and begun to develop.

Relatives of cult members soon grew concerned and requested that the US government rescue what they believed to be brainwashed victims living in concentration camp-like conditions under Jones’s power.

Open fire

In November 1978, California Congressman Leo Ryan arrived in Guyana to survey Jonestown and interview its inhabitants.

After reportedly having his life threatened by a Temple member during the first day of his visit, Ryan decided to cut his trip short and return to the US with some Jonestown residents who wished to leave.

As they boarded their plane, a group of Jones’s guards opened fire on them, killing Ryan and four others. Some members of Ryan’s party escaped, however.

Upon learning this, Jones told his followers that Ryan’s murder would make it impossible for their commune to continue functioning.

Rather than return to the US, the People’s Temple would preserve their church by making the ultimate sacrifice: their own lives.

Jones’s followers were given a deadly concoction of a purple drink mixed with cyanide, sedatives, and tranquilisers. Jones apparently shot himself in the head.

Meanwhile, three decades later in a continent across the Atlantic, a minister is alleged to have been involved in what the media has nauseatingly dubbed the “maize scandal” and his followers take to the streets in Eldoret, running riot and threatening to burn and pillage if their leader is removed from power.

It doesn’t matter that he may have been suspected of wrongdoing, even if the financial benefits of such wrongdoing never trickle down to the fans.