At the beginning of World War II, in late 1941, American concern over the safety of Suriname's aluminum ore led to the occupation of the Dutch colony by 1,000 US troops (Baptiste 1988: 115–29). The main fear was of a possible commando raid out of Vichy-held (pro-Nazi) French Guiana to sabotage the bauxite mines at Moengo in eastern Suriname, or even the blocking of the narrow Cottica River leading to the mines at Moengo. Accordingly, a small concentration camp near Paramaribo in Suriname housed suspected German agents and also German ship crews for the duration of the war. In 1942, three Germans escaped from the camp and traveled overland in an easterly direction to the Maroni River separating Suriname from French Guiana. Upon attempting to cross the river, the Germans were recaptured by the men from a “Bush Negro” village and returned to the Dutch authorities in Paramaribo (Sharp 1942: 14).

The black villagers who captured the German escapees probably were members of the Djuka tribe, one of six Maroon (“Bush Negro” from the Dutch bosch neger) tribes inhabiting the forested interior of Suriname. These peoples, who until very recently represented over 10 percent of Suriname's human population, all descended from escaped African slaves. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries slaves fled inland from the coffee, timber, and sugar cane plantations on Suriname's coastal plain to establish clandestine encampments in the rainforest.