Maldivian Presence on Diego Garcia: Uncovering Colonial Truth

By the Research & Documentation Division, Pen for Rights – Republic of Maldives
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Executive Summary

This article examines the testimony of Maldivian maritime officer Thabah Adnan, whose discovery of Dhivehi funerary inscriptions during a port call on Diego Garcia in 1985 provides an overlooked layer of evidence in the Chagos sovereignty debate. The epigraphic findings constitute material proof of Maldivian cultural presence, contradicting colonial assertions that the archipelago was uninhabited prior to French plantation settlement. Integrating maritime anthropology, epigraphy, and decolonisation jurisprudence, this paper demonstrates how burial practice, naming conventions, and oral geography reflect territorial consciousness and render Maldivian presence visible under international law.

1. Introduction

The Chagos Archipelago, dominated in contemporary imagination by Diego Garcia’s military installations, occupies a legal frontier where Western colonial cartography encountered Indian Ocean indigenous geography. British and Mauritian historical narratives have portrayed these islands as “uninhabited” prior to plantation enterprise, thereby erasing earlier human connections and legitimising later territorial claims.¹ Yet Maldivian oral nomenclature recognises Diego Garcia not as an exotic abstraction but as Foalhavahi or Fehendheeb, names circulating in southern atolls well before European charts emerged.² Naming is a cognitive mapping exercise; communities do not name blank spaces. The persistence of the Dhivehi toponym indicates awareness, engagement and mnemonic possession of the sea spaces surrounding Chagos.

In 1985, Maldivian electrical engineer and merchant navy officer Thabah Adnan landed briefly on Diego Garcia during an emergency port call. What he encountered challenges the dominant historical narrative. Only five minutes inland from the quay, he entered a cemetery whose gravestones bore Dhivehi architectural markers and archaic Thaana inscriptions. His transcription of several epitaphs constitutes independent, contemporaneous evidence of Maldivian presence at Diego Garcia and demands reconsideration of sovereignty and decolonisation principles governing the archipelago.

This article analyses Adnan’s testimony in its maritime, anthropological and legal dimensions, demonstrating why epigraphy matters in sovereignty jurisprudence and how colonial history has systematically erased indigenous memory.

2. The Witness: A Maritime Professional and Reluctant Historian

Electrical Officer (EO) Thabah Adnan embarked on deep-sea service in 1969, trained to maintain electrical, navigation and auxiliary systems on ocean-going vessels. He served under multiple registries, including Yugoslav and Panamanian ones, during the height of merchant fleet transitions under open-registry regimes. His testimony is therefore not that of a nationalist polemicist but of a technical professional recounting events embedded in logbooks, crew rotations and port protocols.

In 1983, Adnan sailed from Rijeka to Port Louis and Diego Garcia before the vessel’s final scrapping in Bhavnagar, India.³ It was during this voyage that he first learned, through interactions with Maldivian sailors on board, that Diego Garcia corresponded to Foalhavahi, a long-known geographical expression within southern Maldivian oral culture.⁴ Two years later, on board a vessel renamed MV World Shelter, he entered Diego Garcia’s harbour on 16 February 1985 after a bottom-plating leakage required emergency diving repairs.⁵ It was this enforced layover that allowed him to step ashore.

3. The Landing and the Epigraphic Encounter

The port was controlled by US naval authorities, and shore liberty was strictly restricted. Initially denied permission to disembark, Adnan persisted, pleading for one hour ashore to mark his approaching birthday. The port officer eventually relented, delegating an escort and allowing him to walk fifty metres beyond the quay.

Only minutes into the walk, a cemetery appeared. Its architecture immediately struck Adnan; Dhivehi funerary typology is distinctive in the Islamic world. Maldivian gravestones are carved in coral, male markers bear crest structures, female markers lack them and inscriptions rely on house-name formulations embedded in Dhivehi kinship culture.⁶ He entered the enclosure, cleared sediment from a headstone with his hands and exposed archaic Thaana script. Recognising its significance, he dispatched his colleague, Abdulla, back to the ship to retrieve paper and a pencil. Working under time pressure before the escort forcibly terminated the visit, he transcribed five names:

Elhebeyaage Hasanaage Kaburafuthaa Thakurufaanu
Dhekenage Aboo Rahaage Kadhdha Dhiye Rahaa
Boda Maga Kaanimaa Idhreehu Hassan Manikufaanu
Korekunaage Thaadhiru Madheebaage Bahaadheraa Badurudhdheen
Maliku Rehendhi Kadhdha Faanuge Moosa Thakura

Each name conforms to Dhivehi epigraphic structure. The ge (house-name) prefix, personal identifier and noble suffix (Thakurufaanu, Manikufaanu, Badurudhdheen, Thakura) are integral to Maldivian genealogical and rank systems.⁷ This linguistic architecture is not found in Madagascar, Mauritius or East African Islamic burial culture.⁸ It implies that the buried individuals belonged to established Dhivehi families or lineages. The forced termination of the visit at around 16:45 hours prevented further transcription or photography; the accompanying port authorities had confiscated his camera upon arrival.

4. Maritime Anthropology and the Chagos as Indigenous Sea Space

Maldivian engagement with Indian Ocean geography predates European navigation. H.C.P. Bell and later Maldivian scholars noted that dhonis and larger vessels from the southern atolls travelled seasonally along current systems reaching the Comoros, Zanzibar, Lakshadweep and Sri Lanka.⁹ The Maldives therefore existed not as an isolated archipelago but as a maritime civilisation whose mobility structured social life.

Within this context, Foalhavahi and Fehendheeb are not myths but elements of oceanic cognitive mapping, oral spatial organisation that indicates historical interaction with the region later labelled Diego Garcia. Such oral geography forms evidence in legal and anthropological contexts, especially when paired with physical traces such as gravestones.

Funerary landscapes are settlement declarations. Anthropologists from Sahlins to Kuper have treated burial grounds as anchors of cultural sovereignty, producing continuity between the living, the dead and land.¹⁰ In Islam, the Shafi’i jurisprudence practiced in the Maldives requires burial on consecrated ground that is ritually sanctioned by community authority.¹¹ One cannot bury without jurisdiction; burial is a legal and cultural act.

5. Epigraphy as Juridical Evidence

In territorial adjudication, tribunals have accorded significance to epigraphic evidence. The Clipperton Island arbitration considered inscriptions demonstrating occupation,¹² while the Minquiers and Ecrehos case at the ICJ weighed graveyards, dwellings and parish jurisdiction as evidence of effective presence.¹³ EO Adnan’s discovery aligns with this jurisprudence.

His testimony demonstrates effectivités, the doctrine that sovereignty is grounded not merely in proclamation but in the sustained performance of authority.¹⁴ A cemetery with vernacular Dhivehi inscriptions constitutes a record of ritual authority exercised over the dead. Such a site cannot be erected by transient foreigners lacking cultural architecture; it presupposes recognition of Chagos as a Maldivian space.

6. Colonial Erasure and the Manufactured Void

British and Mauritian narratives of Chagos as terra vacua mirror broader colonial strategies of writing indigenous peoples out of legal landscapes. Documents describing plantation labourers as “Mozambiques” were often used to obscure Maldivian captives who had been transported across the western Indian Ocean.¹⁵ Campbell notes this euphemistic concealment as a bureaucratic evasion of abolition scrutiny.¹⁶

The same erasure operates in Diego Garcia historiography: indigenous traces were suppressed or ignored because acknowledging them would undermine colonial title. In this light, EO Adnan’s cemetery encounter is more than accidental discovery; it is an interruption of colonial silence. His account also preceded contemporary litigation by decades, having been published in a Dhivehi news magazine in 2007. This temporal separation mitigates allegations of retroactive political fabrication.

7. Decolonisation Doctrine and the Relevance of the Evidence

International law of decolonisation stresses the primacy of historic peoples and continuity. UNGA Resolution 1514 prohibits dismantling existing territorial integrity without the consent of affected peoples, while Resolution 1541 establishes the test for Non-Self-Governing Territories.¹⁷ Maldives was denied NSGT listing on the grounds that it was treated as administratively complete; yet Britain simultaneously detached Chagos in 1965 without indigenous consultation or recognition of historic Maldivian connection.

The ICJ’s Frontier Dispute (Burkina Faso v Mali) decision emphasised that boundaries cannot be re-written by denying pre-colonial presence.¹⁸ The epigraphy found by EO Adnan provides precisely the sort of historical presence that decolonisation doctrine seeks to protect. The convergence of oral toponymy (Foalhavahi), funerary architecture and epigraphic inscription constitutes more than folklore, it forms material evidence of indigenous continuity.

8. Conclusion

Electrical Officer Thabah Adnan’s 1985 landing on Diego Garcia offers a profound corrective to colonial historiography. His encounter with Dhivehi gravestones bearing Thaana inscriptions situates the Chagos Archipelago within Maldivian civilisational and religious space. Burial is never arbitrary; it reflects community action, ritual sanction and recognition of belonging. These epigraphic artefacts therefore represent not mythic claims but jurisdictional performance.

This evidence supports a re-reading of sovereignty over Chagos within the framework of indigenous rights and decolonisation law. It provides grounds for archaeological investigation, incorporation into legal memoranda and submission to international fora including the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation. For Maldivians, it is not only a matter of legal argument but of historical memory. The stones speak; the narrative simply renders their voice audible again.

Illustrative Footnote Sources (Bluebook format)

Laura Jeffery, Chagos Islanders in Mauritius and the UK (Manchester University Press 2011).
Xavier Romero-Frias, The Maldive Islanders: A Study of the Popular Culture of an Ancient Ocean Kingdom (Barcelona 1999).
Voyage chronology per EO Adnan interview testimony (1983 records referenced).
Romero-Frias (1999).
Crew and registration transition testimony (1985 log details).
Naseema Mohamed, National Centre for Linguistic and Historical Research (Dhivehi funerary epigraphy).
Kinship and honorific structure in Maldivian anthro-linguistic literature.
Comparative Islamic funerary typology across western Indian Ocean (Romero-Frias 1999; Campbell 2004).
H.C.P. Bell, The Maldive Islands (1922).
Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago 1985); Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Colonialism (Routledge 1985).
Ritual jurisprudence of Shafi’i Islam governing funerary practice.
Clipperton Island Arbitration (France/Mexico, 1931).
Minquiers and Ecrehos (France v United Kingdom) [1953] ICJ Rep 47.
Malcolm Shaw, International Law (8th edn, Cambridge University Press 2017).
Mauritius and UK historical filings before ITLOS and ICJ.
Gwyn Campbell, Slavery and Forced Migration in the Indian Ocean (Routledge 2004).
UNGA Res 1514 (1960) and 1541 (1960).
Frontier Dispute (Burkina Faso v Mali) [1986] ICJ Rep 554.

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Editorial Lead: Mohamed Saud, Pen for Rights – Republic of Maldives
Based on recorded testimony from: EO Thabah Adnan (Merchant Navy 1969–present)