Shafeeg Ge

The first morning I went to visit Ahmed Shafeeg it was windy. Crossing in the ferry from Villingili to Male, the boat pitched in the dark waves. When I disembarked, salt speckled my brown skin.

I first heard about Shafeeg visiting Absy at the Faculty of Arts back in July. At 81 years, Shafeeg has written 77 books and is one of Maldives’ oldest historians.
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Over the last 30 years, the study of history – and the arts for that matter – was very repressed. In school, students were encouraged to pursue Science or Commerce streams, while Arts streams remained small, and with limited facilities. Many artists, musicians and writers were forced into exile by the former government, and the study of history and geography was seen as subversive. Shafeeg was actually arrested and taken into confinement in the mid-90s by the Gayoom government, his life-long journal confiscated by the authorities as a threat to national security. He and his family are still seeking justice.

Through the help of Adam and Irene Manik, I was put in touch with Ishaag, Shafeeg’s son, who works as a pediatrician in Male’s hospital. I would need a translator, I was told, and Ishaag was more than willing to help. That morning he met me at the terminal and we took a taxi across the island, chatting about Maldives and medicine as we drove. We hit it off immediately. He sported thick frame glasses and had an easy laugh. Soon we were turning into a small goalhi and standing in front of an old wooden door, not quite closed, painted aquamarine.

Above the door was tacked a small sign, and written in white, slanting Dhivehi script were the words Shafeeg Ge. House of Shafeeg. In Maldives the name of one’s home is intensely important. In a sea of Mohameds and Ahmeds, Fathmaths and Aishaths, Maldivians cling to nicknames. But more than that, if you are to inquire after a Mohamed Hussein or an Aminath Ali, more than physical features, people are likely to be known by their house name. Here are some of my personal favorites: Love Nest. Broken Heart. Metallic Garden Ge. Paris Lodge. Canary Ge. Paradise Ge. The fact that Shafeeg’s home is named after him is significant, a testament to his position in his family and the community.

Passing through the doorway, we entered through flinty coral walls into a wide courtyard – somewhat of an anomaly here in Male’. A huge breadfruit tree vied for space among the concrete buildings. Far below, leafy gardens skirted a frothy fountain teeming with orange fish. A fresh layer of white sand had been raked across the compound in preparation for Ramazan, the Muslim month of fasting.

Inside a glass outeroom, Shafeeg leaned against the far wall on a wicker bench, a carved wooden cane resting between his knees. He wore the traditional sarong, dark grey, and a white linen shirt with an embroidered collar. Shafeeg has large, leathery ears and his eyes are an intense, milky blue, slightly unfocused – as though looking far beyond that which lies directly in front of him. He smiled as I entered, reaching out to shake my hand.

I couldn’t stop staring.

Papered over the windows were hundreds of pictures. Some old and yellowed, others very clearly recent additions. Princess Diana in a strapless dress in profile, Nelson Mandela (his favorite political leader), JFK, Osama Bin Laden, Indira Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Idi Amin, Hitler, Martin Luther King Jr., George Bush – Maumoon Gayoom (the former president), and Mohammed Nasheed (Anni, the current president). Tacked between the profiles of famous leaders were cultural artifacts, news clippings. Women weaving traditional mats in Gaaf Dhaal atoll, boatbuilding, bodu beru drumming, the 1988 coup attempt. Above the door rested an expanded illustration of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Beside Shafeeg, above a small table stacked with books and papers, two family trees fanned out in Dhivehi script. A chart of protected bird species leaned over the windows. Through an open door into Shafeeg’s adjoining bedroom, black and white photographs of the royal family stared blankly into space.

Ishag explained later that Shafeeg suffers from short-term memory loss. This room, this political, historical shrine, serves as a means of reminding him of the history he has explored in his lifetime.

Shafeeg was born into the Huravee dynasty early Tuesday morning, May 15, 1928, in the twilight years of the Maldivian sultanate. His father suffered from a mental disorder and so he was neglected as a child, raised largely by his aunt and treated as a servant in her home.

“He’s one of the few people from the kingdom at that time who was interacting with the common people,” explained Ishag. “Because he was a neglected child, he would go out and nobody would ask where he was going. In the kingdom children were not allowed to go out and meet with common people, whereas he would go out and interact with people in the market, chasing the cows every which way in the jungle, you know. He was living a double life, in a sense. It was not like that before. He grew up with the common people and the king.”

I asked Shafeeg what Male’ was like when he was a child.

Male was covered with trees then. Large forts, since demolished, surrounded the island, he explained. As the economic and political stronghold for all of Maldives, security was essential. As the monsoon shifted and the easterly winds began to wash over Male, bringing trade but also pirates, its citizens would begin to prepare for war.

The palace was a large compound – far bigger than the area that houses the National museum today in Sultan Park. Whereas common homes were erected using coconut leaves and wood, the walls of the palace were constructed from stone and cement. “All around the palace a canal was built, it was called kandu, literally meaning water,” he explained. In this moat, turtles swam and gates were erected at certain areas to move in and out. “The reason was to prevent people from entering the palace,” he said.

There were two tall statues that stood guard at the north and south reaches of the compound – a man and a woman (a remnant, he thinks, from their Buddhist past, as figures are forbidden in Islam). “Even now the children get hurt and they’ll sey Adio or Alifano. They’re actually calling those statues.”

Shafeeg was unable to go abroad for further studies, but he did reach the highest level of education at that time, completing 7th standard.

Shafeeg’s first memory was in 1933 with the new constitution and the advent of what he believes was the first democracy. “There was a time when most of the elite children went abroad for further studies, and when they returned they brought the democracy. They thought it was not right to have a monarchy system in this country.”

The palace he grew up in was steeped in hedonism. After the sunset, the sultan would retreat to his palace, where he engaged in lavish, sexual intrigues. Dissenters were put down. “During that time the lawyers and judges that disobeyed the sultan were murdered, burned and placed in large vessels and buried so that people did not know where they were taken, whether he’s dead - nobody knows. So that’s how the sultan controlled this constitution and the people, by force.” In the 1960s, working to construct the Sultan Park and the museum, these vessels were uncovered.

“The noble and the official level and the common people had three different languages. They spoke in a different language to each other.” Often yielding diverse verb forms, each social level used a different language in communicating with one another. Nowadays this stratification is diminishing, but many of my friends still used the different forms in particular situations. The new president, Anni, is known to use the common form when mingling with the people – a huge departure from the conduct of the former president Gayoom.


Shafeeg married out of caste. It was love at first sight, he told me. Maizan Aminath Mohamed Maniku‘s ancestor was a slave in Mozambique, but had been released during the Hajj and brought back to Maldives. In choosing to marry someone outside of social standing, Shafeeg and his wife were cast out to the streets, eventually given a small plot of land on which they still live by the wife of former President Amin.

While he always possessed a keen interest in the life around him, Shafeeg did not begin to pursue history until later in life. Working as an atoll chief, Shafeeg was away from Male’ for long stretches of time. His wife would send him letters, chatting about his children, this and that going on in Male. He began to keep and record them, seeing their value as history. He took a keen interest in birds, and began to study them, eventually advocating for their protection He began to keep a daily journal that became something of a political history of Maldives in a time when history was not being recorded. People used to come and visit him to hear about the political history, to glean political advice. In the leafy menagerie outside of his small study, people of all ages and beliefs would gather in the joalis, or hammock chairs, to discuss all manner of things. Openly and without fear.

When people started disappearing during the former regime, Shafeeg kept a list. By now he has tallied 111 names. When his journal was taken by Gayoom, it was as though his heart was taken, he explained to me.

“Were you ever scared?” I asked one afternoon. Afterall, Shafeeg had been a prisoner of conscience, and at the hands of Gayoom spent more than 80 days in solitary confinement. He endured torture and suffered from PTSD. I waited for Ishag to translate. Shafeeg shook his head furiously, his brow knitting and a steely glint forming in his eyes. Then he laughed. “Never scared.” In the end, he added, Shafeeg would like to die an activist.

That first morning, I found myself stumbling as I asked questions – Shafeeg knew so much about so many topics – political, historical, cultural – that to focus my interview was difficult. We roamed through discussions of early travel, the role of women in Maldives society (women used to man the gunpowder for the cannons, and one queen killed both her husbands to maintain power), palace life, democracy, religion. Since then I’ve been back to talk about traditional boatbuilding, weather, creation myths, but inevitably I find the conversation always tends towards politics and justice.

As the morning wore on, and as the sun rose in the sky, illuminating different clippings with each passing hour, various people filtered in and out. Family members, a group of students. Shafeeg welcomes each warmly, happy to speak about his life and his experiences with any who might chance a visit.

Shafeeg’s case against the former government was recently rejected by the Human Rights Commission as being too old to bring to trial. As he and his family seek justice in the coming months, I hope that such atrocities can be brought to light and that justice will be served.