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Mabi-beer rejected as an indigenous drink 19-20th
The 19th century sounds like a death blow for the Mabi-beer. The documents only rarely refer to it.
Colonisation is a fait accompli. The relative emancipation of the black populations of the Caribbean Islands and Guianas (after the abolition of slavery, which was pronounced almost everywhere in the middle of the century) intensified the commercial exchanges with the respective metropolises of these colonies.
A colonial and Creole society was established. The Amerindians and their fermented beverages are part of a past that one wants to erase. The image of the poor and poorly integrated Amerindian hardens. The mabi and the manioc beer are among the cultural clichés used to describe the few Caribbean groups that have managed to survive and are recalled to stigmatise their differences.
On the spot, the cultivation of sugar cane accentuates the consumption of rum. Brewing and drinking the mabi-beer are the mark of the few surviving Amerindians.
This general picture needs to be nuanced. In the islands of the West Indies and the Caribbean, Creole society largely dominates. The Amerindians, when they have not completely disappeared, are totally marginalised. A small community still exists in Dominica in 1938[1].
In French Guiana, colonised with less intensity and protected by the density and extent of its forests, the Amerindians have preserved their way of life. They still love and know how to brew their ancestral sweet potato beers. But the image held by the vast majority of the other inhabitants of French Guyana still reflect the same disdain. Drinking the mabi-beer (and cachiri from cassava) means for the creoles and the whites to live in the wild.
[1] Delawarde J. B. 1938, Les derniers Caraïbes. Leur vie dans une réserve de la Dominique, Journal de la Société des Américanistes. Tome 30 n°1, 167-204.