The Batak Maloyeng — that is, the Mandailing Bataks — are one of the four Batak sub-groups named in Vol. I of The Achehnese in C. Snouck Hurgronje’s account of slaves in Acheh. The Achehnese name Maloyeng is glossed by Snouck as the equivalent of Mandailing, the southernmost of the Batak country, lying on the borders of the Menangkabau territory.
The Mandailing are listed alongside the Bata’ Kar’ee (Karo) — “the wildest and most vicious” of the Bataks, whose name is used by the Achehnese as a generic term of evil import for the whole Batak race — together with the Bata’ Pakpak and the Bata’ Tuba. All four are covered by the contemptuous Achehnese use of Bata’ Kar’ee as a stock name.
The male Bataks imported as slaves into Acheh came “mostly from Singkel and Trumon” — that is, from the West-Coast Batak country — and were characterised as “unwilling, lazy and revengeful.” Every Achehnese, Snouck remarks, could furnish plentiful examples of their treachery: “how one Batak has treacherously murdered his master through anger at a trifling chastisement, and another after having been treated with the utmost kindness has made himself scarce after putting his master’s children to death, and so on.”
The geographical position of Mandailing — between the Batak highlands and the Menangkabau country of the Padang uplands — gave its people a special importance in the slave traffic of the west coast. In the broader frame of Vol. I, the Mandailing are part of the wider ring of mainland and insular Sumatran peoples with whom the Achehnese were in contact, alongside the Gayo, the Alas, and the Menangkabau themselves. Their mention here serves to fix, from the Achehnese side, the southern limit of the Batak world as known to and exploited by the sultanate.
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.