Abyssinia — known in Achehnese by the generic name Abeusi (cognate with the Malay Habshi, derived from Arabic Habashī) — is, in The Achehnese, the conventional designation for the African origin of slaves brought to Acheh not directly from Africa but by way of Mecca. Snouck Hurgronje is explicit that the term was applied “irrespectively of what may be the land of their birth”; the name Abyssinia was, in short, an Achehnese shorthand for any black African, and not a precise ethnographic label.
These Abeusi slaves were “brought home from Mekka by those who have performed the Hajj.” The annual pilgrimage thus served, for Acheh as for other Muslim societies of the Archipelago, as a channel of involuntary African immigration. The Abeusi were kept chiefly as household servants; “it is considered a mark of distinction to have such Abeusis as household servants.” Concubinage with female slaves of African origin was extremely rare; they were permitted to marry among themselves or with Niasese slaves. The Achehnese, who lay great weight on descent from the mother’s side, generally avoided begetting children by their female slaves of any race, and the very few cases of interracial concubinage with Abeusi women seem to have been beneath ordinary Achehnese notice.
The Abeusi stood in contrast to the more numerous Nias slaves, who were imported directly from the island of Nias and were valued for their tractability, obedience and trustworthiness. Male Bataks, by comparison, were occasionally kept as slaves but were characterised as unwilling, lazy and revengeful. Chinese female slaves from the Straits Settlements were a still rarer luxury, permitted only to persons of position; and the same footnote records the unusual case of a freed Circassian slave living at Ulee Lheue (Olehleh), formerly the property of Habib Abdurrahman, who “also imported Hindus as slaves into Acheh.”
The Abeusi thus represent, in Snouck Hurgronje’s account of the racial composition of Acheh, a small but socially visible African element introduced through the religious traffic of the pilgrimage rather than through commerce or war. They were one of several “foreign elements” — Arabs, Egyptians, Javanese, Bugis, Klings and others — whose share in the formation of the Achehnese people the author regards as “merely accidental”, in contrast to the established unity of the Achehnese themselves.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.