The Commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point . . . . He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

To fly into the Niger Delta is to fall from grace. From the air, the silvery waters seem peaceful. Dubbed "The Venice of West Africa" in 1867 by British explorer Winwood Reade, the Delta stretches 290 miles along the Atlantic coast from the Benin River in the west to the Cross River in the east. In between, the powerful Niger feeds an intricate network of tributaries and creeks that partition sandbars and mangrove islands into cookie-cutter shapes as they meander toward the Gulf of Guinea.

Yet far beneath the belly of the airplane, oil fields mottle the landscape, their rigs ceaselessly pumping crude and natural gas from deep underground. The gas bums incessantly in giant geysers of flame and smoke, and at night the flares that ring the city of Port Harcourt and fishing villages deep within the mangrove swamps cast a hellish glow. As the smoke from the flares rises above the palm trees, methane and carbon dioxide separate from the greasy soot. The gases rise but the grime descends, coating the trees, the laundry hanging on lines, the mud-daubed huts, and the people within. There is nothing pure left in Nigeria.

In May of 1995, I traveled to Nigeria to scout the front lines of the struggle for the country's soul that pits the indigenous peoples of the Delta against Royal Dutch/ Shell, other petroleum producers, and the military government. It is a conflict that threatens the fabric of Nigerian society, and by that I don't mean the political fabric--which, like most African nations, was never much more than a crazy quilt of hundreds of tribal groups haphazardly stitched together by colonial governments--but the character of the people. Easy oil money has created a culture of corruption that, even for Third World military dictatorships, is breathtakingly epic. It wasn't just that on a short drive out of Port Harcourt my taxi driver was stopped twelve times by police demanding bribes, or that the military was exporting its methods of intimidation, graft, and outright thievery to Liberia as part of its U.N. "peacekeeping" duties there, or that foreign businesses have to anticipate extra expenditures to cover kickbacks and payoffs. It was that in Nigeria, even the innocent are sullied, their expectations lowered, their complicity expected, perhaps even inevitable. Crude oil, once viewed as the means of Nigeria's ascent to greatness, had instead greased the skids into chaos.

The latest manifestation of Nigeria's descent was the trial of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a member of a Delta tribe called the Ogoni, who six years ago began organizing his people against the petroleum producers and the' military regime. His efforts earned him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination and landed him--along with fourteen other members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, or MOSOP--in prison on trumped-up charges that he ordered the murder of four Ogoni chiefs who had disagreed with his increasingly militant actions. I was to attend the trial later in my visit, and although the government had preordained his guilt, the question was larger than whether Saro-Wiwa would be executed or merely imprisoned indefinitely. The question was whether one man, dead or alive, had started an indigenous revolt against the tenth-largest, and the most profitable, corporation in the world, or, in the long view, had failed to prevent that company from poisoning his country.

I hired a small skiff at the Port Harcourt waterfront. Five minutes down the Bonny River the sounds of the city were lost to the whine of the outboard and the syncopated percussion of a tropical downpour. For three hours, as I crouched beneath a thick tarpaulin, the boat threaded through a network of creeks, overtaking fishermen in canoes--their paddles rhythmically dipping into the coffee-colored water--river taxis, oil barges, and ghost ships scuttled among the mangroves. Herons and egrets flapped by, and occasionally telltale plumes of smoke from gas flares wafted above the trees. At last I arrived in Okoroba: a cluster of weather-beaten, rain-sod-den wooden huts and dugout canoes huddled around a splintered pier. Six years ago, Shell had dredged a canal through Okoroba to reach a new well. Since then, the company had yet to produce oil but it had tapped deep reserves of frustration and rage.

Paramount chief Steven Joel Engobila, a near-toothless man in a black bowler hat, sat on a battered cushioned sofa in his dim hut. Its walls were bare except for a faded 1991 Shell Oil calendar. He led me outside for a tour of Okoroba. Heavy rain had turned the dirt alleys into quagmires; filthy, naked children ran out of huts, excitedly screaming "Oibo!" (white man). The village had no electricity, no paved roads, no shops, and a primary school with broken wooden chairs and a leaking roof. A trip to the nearest doctor took four hours by canoe. As we walked across a swamped soccer field, sinking to our ankles in the muck, Engobila ran through a list of Shell's misdeeds. The canal builders had knocked down the village health center, he said, flattened most of the village's coconut palms, and damaged the local fishing industry by flooding freshwater creeks with salt water.

"We tried to grow new coconuts, but they died. We don't know why," he said. Shell had paid a few dollars' compensation for the destroyed trees, built a water tank, and contracted with a local firm to construct a new health center, but the workers had abandoned the structure after a few months. "This is empty public relations," Engobila said, waving his hand at the roofless concrete-block building. "Shell brought us nothing but anguish." The chief felt powerless. "We are ignorant people. What can we do?" Most people in the region were so destitute, Engobila admitted, that they lived in constant hope that an oil spill would bring them even a small settlement from the company.

It is nearly impossible to overstate Shell's role in Nigeria. Today, under the terms of its OPEC quota, Nigeria produces about 2 million barrels of crude a day, bringing about $10 billion a year to the military junta and accounting for about 97 percent of export revenues. Half of that total is pumped by Shell, making the company by far the dominant economic force in Nigeria. The relationship between the company and the country is not exactly colonial. Colonialism is unwieldy, expensive, and risky. Shell, like the multinationals in Mexico and Indonesia, merely recognizes a good business climate when it sees one, and that is all it chooses to see. That much, Nnaemeka Achebe, Shell's polished and articulate general manager and the highest-ranking Nigerian in the company, cheerfully admitted when I visited him in his plush Lagos office with sweeping views of the Gulf of Guinea. "For a commercial company trying to make investments, you need a stable environment," Achebe said. "Dictatorships can give you that. Right now in Nigeria there is acceptance, peace, and continuity."

In truth, Nigeria has never really known peace. This country of 100 million people, whose boundaries were established by the British in 1914, is a pastiche of more than 250 ethnic groups, and between many of them are ancient, even violent divisions of language, religion, and culture. Violence escalated with the arrival of the Dutch and British, who used the Delta waterways to build the largest slave trade in West Africa. But these revenues paled in comparison with what followed. In 1937, the British government gave Shell D'Arcy, as the Anglo-Dutch company was then called, the exclusive right to prospect for oil. For more than two decades, exploration parties traveled by raft, canoe, barge, and on foot through the malarial swamps of the Delta, conducting seismographic surveys and core drilling. Wildcatters struck their first commercial deposits in 1956. During the following decade, as Nigeria gained independence from Great Britain, Shell laid pipelines through the Delta and opened the Bonny Island oil terminal downriver from Port Harcourt.

At that time, Nigeria was poised to become the undisputed leader of Africa. In addition to huge deposits of crude, the country had rich farmland, an educated population, and a democratic government. Its three dominant tribes--the Hausa-Fulanis in the Muslim north, the Yorubas in the west, and the Ibos in the east--were proud, artistic people with histories dating back a thousand years. Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe stood at the vanguard of an African literary renaissance.

Over the past generation, however, the promises of Nigeria have given way to disappointment and failure. In 1966, a military dictatorship from the northern Hausa-Fulani tribe seized power, and northern-dominated juntas have ruled the country for twenty-six of the thirty years since. They have profited enormously from the country's vast oil resources while deepening the misery of just about everyone else.

Immediately after the Hausa-Fulanis seized power, the Ibos led the Biarran region--which included the Delta, home of the Ogoni, Ogbia, Ijaw, and Andoni minority tribes--into a bloody revolt that lasted three years. After the Ibos were routed in 1970, Shell and the government were free to enter into a joint venture known as the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria, or SPDC. Shell put up the bulk of exploration and equipment costs, and in return it got to export 30 percent of the crude oil pumped, with 55 percent going to the government and the rest to two European companies, Elf and Agip. (American oil companies also have operations in Nigeria.) Collective gross oil revenues mushroomed from $600 million in 1973 to $26 billion in 1981.

While Shell and the other companies did all the work, the government sat back and collected its share of the profit. Between 1970 and 1974, the portion of government revenue derived from oil production jumped from 26 percent to 82 percent, about where it remains today. This surge in oil profits transformed Nigerian politics. Controlling the country now meant access to an ever-filling jackpot, and the "Kaduna Mafia," the Muslim-dominated military-industrial cabal named after a city in Nigeria's north, rose to unchallenged power. Officials awarded themselves billions of dollars' worth of inflated government construction contracts, lined their pockets with lucrative kickbacks, and transformed the British system of indirect rule through local chiefs into ethnic rivalry, nepotism, and institutionalized graft. Today the country is far better known for its heroin traffickers and financial scam artists than for its novelists.

The new wealth also created new poverty. While the average Nigerian scrapes by on less than $300 a year--down from about $1,200 in 1978--the country's oil elite dwell in lavish compounds with fleets of Mercedes, imported food and wine, and fat overseas bank accounts. According to Western. diplomats, when oil prices soared during the Gulf War, former leader General Ibrahim Babangida reported no corresponding rise in the federal income; the equally klepto-cratic current dictator, General Sani Abacha, has also siphoned off billions of dollars in oil profits. Meanwhile, the junta dropped any pretense of accountability to the people. In June 1993, Babangida annulled Nigeria's democratic presidential election. Five months later, Abacha, a participant in three previous coups who is known by his ritual scars and fondness for epaulets, seized power, abolished all democratic institutions and regional governments, shut down newspapers, and jailed most of the opposition, including the winner of the 1993 presidential election, Moshood Abiola. Such corruption, and the resultant neglect of infrastructure and development, has only furthered Nigeria's dependence on petroleum. Agriculture, which once accounted for 90 percent of export income, is in ruins. Nigeria's cities, swollen by the mass migration from rural areas during the 1970s oil boom, are smog-choked zones of anarchy.

Such as Port Harcourt. The city, home of Shell's Eastern Division headquarters, has swelled in population in the last twenty-five years from 80,000 to over a million. Lured by the promise of money, nearby tribespeople walked away from their fields and fisheries only to find themselves living here in concrete hovels in the shadow of glass office buildings and billboards advertising cellular phones and direct TV. A miasma of pollution hangs over potholed streets teeming with oil tankers, fertilizer trucks, overcrowded buses, and secondhand foreign imports known as tokumbos. Barefoot teenage vendors weave through the seemingly endless traffic jams, known as "go slows," hawking welcome mats, cap guns, hangers, Q-tips. They compete with polio victims who thrust their twisted limbs through car windows, pleading, "Mastah. Please, Mastah, just give me five naira only."

Known in imperial times as the Garden City, Port Harcourt today is dirty and denuded; virtually the only oasis is Shell Camp, a heavily guarded compound where 180 expatriate (and some high-ranking Nigerian) Shell executives live in air-conditioned luxury. amidst manicured lawns, ten-his courts, and a golf course, as if in some far-flung fragment of Sacramento. Contact with ordinary Nigerians is intentionally limited: on workdays, executives travel by company car to the division headquarters, and from there by helicopter to oil facilities throughout the Delta.

Except for the gates, visitor badges, and security checks, Shell Camp could have been a location for a 1950s family sitcom, but outside the compound's fences was a very different story. By May of 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa was in prison, the government had closed Ogoniland to outsiders, and troops had beaten foreign reporters attempting to get in. MOSOP members who were not already in jail were living semi-clan-destinely in a kind of anxious limbo; no one was eager to act as my guide into their homeland.

Eventually Batom Mitee, a bearded, bespectacled man in his late thirties whose brother Ledum was on trial with Saro-Wiwa, agreed to escort me the next morning to the epicenter of the resistance, though he dared not cross the border in my company. I set out in a truck conspicuously marked "Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine," sitting next to bona fide medical personnel and clutching a set of fake credentials; Mitee followed in another vehicle. At 8:00 A.M. it was already pushing 90 degrees; the air was thick with swamp decay and diesel exhaust.

When we reached the border an hour later, the soldiers demanded a small payoff and waved us through. In Ogoniland's Gokana district, I met up with Mitee in his home village of Kegbara Dere. Here was a place and a people utterly subservient to the production of oil. High-pressure oil pipes snaked amid plots of yam and cassavas, past mud-brick huts, even through people's yards; I watched as one woman climbed over a tangle of pipes to get to her front door.

Ogoniland has a population of 500,000 crammed into 400 square miles. It contains ninety-six oil wells, four oil fields, one petrochemical plant, one fertilizer plant, and two refineries, By some estimates, the region has produced about 600 million barrels of crude during the past forty years. But despite the billions of dollars it has provided to Shell and various military regimes, Ogoniland has no hospitals, few jobs, one of the highest infant-mortality rates in Nigeria, and a 20 percent literacy rate. Moreover, frequent blowouts and leaking pipes have damaged crops and streams, sometimes irreparably; Ogoniland suffered 111 oil spills between 1985 and 1994. (Shell claims that 77 of those spills were the result of sabotage.)

"In the old days in Gokana you could fish, farm, and survive without money," said Mitee. We were sitting beside an abandoned natural-gas flare; until increasingly violent protests caused Shell to cease operations in Ogoniland in 1993, it had spewed a toxic cloud of smoke and flame 100 feet into the air above Kegbara Dere twenty-four hours a day. "But oil exploration spoiled the creeks and the seas, and you can't fish like you did before. We used to have a lot of land, but Shell made much of that unusable. Also, there's never been any family planning here, so there's growing pressure for land. My father has five sons--we can't all have his land. So we have to look for jobs. But there aren't any jobs. Everybody is suffering."

It was in this landscape that I began to apprehend what had compelled Ken Saro-Wiwa to confront the perversion of Nigeria. Born in the Khana district of Ogoniland in 1941 to a tribal chief, Saro-Wiwa attended mission schools, eventually winning a scholarship to the University of Ibadan, near Lagos. He served as administrator of the Bonny Island oil depot during the Biafran war, and between 1968 and 1973 he was a regional commissioner for education. When his militant views on Ogoni rights got him sacked, he launched successful real estate and grocery businesses, a publishing company, and a writing career that made him famous throughout Nigeria. His first novel, Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, was an antiwar tale about a village youth recruited into the rebel army during the Biafran conflict. Later came On a Darkling Plain, an autobiographical account of the Biafran war, and Basi and Company, a TV sitcom watched by 30 million Nigerians that lampooned the country's get-rich-quick attitude. But a political role beckoned. "Ken had this idea from the time he was fifteen," says Batom Mitee. "He wanted to create a campaign modeled after the American civil-rights movement, with mass protests, sit-ins, boycotts, vigils. He started mobilizing in 1990."

For decades, Shell had pumped oil in the Delta virtually free of burdensome environmental regulations. There were few or no requirements to conduct environmental impact studies, recycle oil waste, or lay subterranean oil pipes instead of cheap aboveground pipes. According to Greenpeace, between 1982 and 1992, 37 percent of Shell's spills world-wide--amounting to 1.6 million gallons-took place in the Delta. And according to data compiled for Shell by the World Wide Fund for Nature and leaked to the British newspaper the Independent, 76 percent of the natural gas pumped up with crude in Nigeria is burned off--compared with 20 percent in Libya, Saudi Arabia, or Iran; 4.3 percent in the United Kingdom; and 0.6 percent in the United States. Each year, gas flares in Nigeria emit 34 million tons of carbon dioxide and 12 million tons of methane, making petroleum operations in Nigeria the biggest single cause of global warming, according to the Independent.

The Ogonis claim that the gas flares cause acid rain that kills crops and fouls drinking water. But they have no legal recourse to fight the destruction of their environment. In 1978, the military declared all land in Nigeria the property of the federal government, freeing the petroleum companies from troublesome negotiations with locals sitting on top of oil. Four years later, the government agreed- to allocate 1.5 percent of federal revenues to the 12 million people living in oil-producing areas. In 1990, after the paramilitary police--known as the Kill and Go Mob--massacred more than fifty residents of Umuechem who were demanding that Shell provide them with potable water and scholarships, the figure was raised to 3 percent. But most of the money has been siphoned off by corrupt officials, and Shell has shown little initiative to make reparations it-sell In the nearly forty years that it has pumped oil in Ogoniland, Shell has by its own calculation put in only $2 million worth of improvements, including a smattering of schools and some medical equipment.

About the same time as the Umuechem massacre, Saro-Wiwa launched the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People with a handful of other members of Ogoniland's educated elite. They drafted an Ogoni Bill of Rights and demanded $10 billion in reparations from Shell and a measure of political autonomy for Ogoniland. Matching incendiary rhetoric with organizational skill, Saro-Wiwa became MOSOP's spokesperson. He was by all accounts a magnetic speaker, calling Shell's operations "genocide" and "systematic extermination," and urging the Ogonis to fight for their rights. On January 4, 1993, Saro-Wiwa drew international attention to their cause by leading a peaceful protest march of 300,000 people through Ogoniland.

Yet like so much in Nigeria, how dedicated Saro-Wiwa was to pacifism is a matter of great dispute. Against the wishes of other MOSOP leaders, Saro-Wiwa formed a more radical youth wing of the movement. Sabotage and threats to Shell workers increased; in January 1993, Shell ceased manned operations in Ogoni-land, a move that cost the company and the government 28,000 barrels of crude oil a day. Although that amount was just 3 percent of oil production in Nigeria, MOSOP's actions signified unprecedented defiance of the junta, which feared that another secessionist movement was brewing in the Delta. The general manager of SPDC asked the government to protect Shell's installations across the Delta. During the summer of 1993, the government began replacing Ogoni police officers with officers from different ethnic groups, who prompted neighboring tribes into a series of attacks that left thousands of Ogonis dead or homeless.

In response, Saro-Wiwa called for the Ogonis to boycott the upcoming democratic presidential election, a tactic that widened schisms between the elite and the younger, poorer activists. Four MOSOP officers resigned, leaving Saro-Wiwa in charge of the organization. Ogoniland was quickly polarized, with many Ogoni activists becoming increasingly angry at the region's "traditional chiefs," hereditary leaders who oversaw the local distribution of government jobs and oil-cleanup, road, and construction contracts. When the chiefs warned Ogoni youths to desist from violence, posters appeared throughout the region branding the chiefs "vultures" and calling for their punishment. "MOSOP was changing the traditional structure," said Dr. David Owens Wiwa, Ken's younger brother. "Those who benefited from the old establishment, from government contracts, were seen as depriving the people of their due."

Revenge against the "vultures" could be harsh. Priscilla Vikue, the director-general of the Ministry of Education in Port Harcourt, was one of those branded a collaborator by Ogoni militants. "The youths requested that I resign my government appointment," she told me. "I refused. That's when they burned my house to the ground, along with those of six traditional chiefs."

Saro-Wiwa always publicly maintained that he sought to restrain the troublemakers, even asking the Nigerian military to arrest certain "hoodlums," but Vikue and other members of the elite who testified against him maintain that his anti-establishment rhetoric fueled the youths' actions. "I complained to Saro-Wiwa," said Vikue. "I said, 'Have you heard what they did to me? To my house?' He said, 'Look, Priscilla, there is a revolution in Ogoniland. You'd better go with it because heads will roll.' I was shocked," Vikue said. "He told the people they were qualified to live like kings and queens, that they would all be millionaires. And the people were unemployed. They believed him. I told him, 'You're misleading them. Not everyone can drive a Mercedes.' "

By 1994, the government had decided to escalate its efforts against MOSOP. A May 5 internal memo authored by Major Paul Okuntimo, head of the regional arm of the military, the Rivers State Internal Security Force, warned of what was to come: "Shell operations still impossible unless ruthless military operations are undertaken for smooth economic activities to commence. . . . Recommendations: Wasting operations during MOSOP and other gatherings making constant military presence justifiable. Wasting targets cutting across communities and leadership cadres especially vocal individuals of various groups." Four hundred more troops were sent to Ogoniland, and the memo notes that the government was pressuring the oil companies to underwrite the operation. "This is it," Saro-Wiwa told Greenpeace after the memo was leaked to MOSOP. "They are going to arrest us all and execute us. All for Shell."

Saro-Wiwa's prediction may have been melodramatic, but it was also prescient. Shortly before noon on May 21, 1994, the traditional chief of the village of Giokoo hosted at his palace a meeting of about 100 other Ogoni chiefs and supporters. The event had been well publicized, and many young Ogonis were suspicious that the chiefs were planning to collaborate with the military to quell MOSOP. Suddenly, recalled eyewitness Al-Haji Kobani, "there was the sound of a loud motorcycle outside. A guy came in and said, 'Ken has been arrested on the way to a political rally.' Three minutes later the place was surrounded by over 2,000 people. There was no escape route. They removed our wristwatches, shoes, belts, and everything that was in our pockets. They escorted about 50 people to safety. Then the rest were left in the hall for killing. They attacked us with bottles, stones, iron bars, and machetes. I tried to talk sense to them. But they said, 'Ken Saro-Wiwa is going to bring us a kingdom.'"

Al-Haji's brother Edward Kobani, a Gokana chief, former Rivers State government official, and one of MOSOP's founders, was killed on the spot by a rake driven into his skull. The other victims, all erstwhile friends of Saro-Wiwa's who broke with him in 1993, were Albert Badey, a former secretary to the Rivers State government; Chief Samuel Orage, a former Rivers State commissioner, an Ogoni chief, and the brother-in-law of Saro-Wiwa's wife, Maria; and his brother, Chief Theophilous Orage, also a traditional leader. All three were chased down and murdered at a nearby market. According to witnesses, the killers stuffed the corpses inside a Volkswagen, doused them with gasoline, and set them on fire.

The chief's palace in Giokoo remains a monument to the violence unleashed by MOSOP. All of its louvered windows were smashed, and shams of glass covered the veranda. I could still make out faint bloodstains on the eggshell-blue walls of the large living room--the spot where Edward Kobani died. Overturned easy chairs, broken glass, cooking pots, leaves, and empty bottles of schnapps--a traditional gift to village chiefs littered the bare cement floor. A narrow hallway led to the juju shrine behind the house to which Al-Haji Kobani crawled during the mayhem, managing to save himself. Inside the shrine, chameleons scurried over sacks of cement, more empty schnapps bottles, and a pile of rodent skulls. As I looked over the palace, the intoxicating mixture of euphoria and rage that drove the killers seemed almost palpable. Rousing the Ogoni masses from passivity and despair, Saro-Wiwa had filled them with a sense of entitlement and rancor toward the old order. He may have been miles from the scene of the killings in Giokoo, but he was, in some way, responsible.

One day after the killings at Giokoo, a brigade from the Rivers State Internal Security Force stormed into Ogoniland, arrested MOSOP activists, and allegedly murdered and raped hundreds of civilians. Major Paul Okuntimo, the author of the secret "wasting" memo, led the troops. He was later implicated by one of his own soldiers in the rape of at least two women.

After I left Giokoo, I went to visit Okuntimo at his family's bungalow at the Bori military camp in Port Harcourt. He had a disarmingly charismatic presence--muscular, handsome, and well-spoken. Wearing a white jogging suit and smiling, he invited me into his house. Faded Christmas ornaments, wedding photos, and a plaque proclaiming MY FAMILY IS COVERED WITH THE BLOOD oF JESUS decorated the dusty, dark living room. Promoted to lieutenant colonel as a reward for his achievements in Ogoniland, Okuntimo is said to be planning a career in the evangelical Christian ministry when he retires from the army.

He disappeared into a back room and emerged five minutes later dressed in crisp fatigues. Then we climbed into his Toyota Land Cruiser and roared down a rutted dirt road to the headquarters of the military's Second Amphibious Brigade. Soldiers snapped to attention as he strode into his office, which was dominated by portraits of General Abacha and the army chief of staff. Okuntimo sat down behind an empty desk and leaned forward. "Look," he began, assuming a tone of restraint. "The Ogoni organization was established in good faith. But their nonviolent campaign metamorphosed. These young vigilantes took over the leadership, they set up roadblocks, they seized weapons from police stations, they began executing anyone they viewed as the enemy. At a certain point, Saro-Wiwa simply lost control.

"There was no relationship between the army and Shell. There were no discussions before the operation," he insisted. I asked Okuntimo about the admissions of some of his troops, cited in a Human Rights Watch/Africa report, that they had gunned down dozens of civilians on his orders. He laughed dismissively, and if he was lying--and I believe that he was--then it was accomplished with ease. "Where did I throw the corpses? In the creeks? They would float. Did I bury them? They could dig them up. These are all lies spread by Ogoni sympathists."

On May 17, 1995, I took a seat in the upstairs gallery of a small, high-ceilinged courtroom in a secure government compound in downtown Port Harcourt where Saro-Wiwa and fourteen other Ogoni activists, including top officials and members of the youth wing, were facing capital murder charges for having incited the killings at Giokoo. Frayed red carpets, peeling plaster walls, and forty whirring ceiling fans gave the courtroom a sad, neglected feeling. Two dozen soldiers armed with automatic weapons lined the walls, guarded the entrance, and peered in the windows from the garden outside. On the dais sat the three judges--two civilians in gray suits and a uniformed lieutenant colonel with a doctorate in criminology. Their verdict was unappealable, pending confirmation by General Abacha.

At one o'clock, the shuttered prison van carrying Saro-Wiwa and his codefendants arrived from the military barracks where they'd been detained for one year. Saro-Wiwa's appearance hushed the murmur of journalists and the families of the defendants and victims. He was a tiny, compactly built man, no more than five foot three, and wore gold-rimmed glasses, a brightly dyed green, blue, and white caftan, and leather sandals. Obviously in deteriorating physical condition, he leaned on a carved wooden cane as he slowly wobbled toward the dock. The day's first prosecution witness, a former MOSOP official, recounted a meeting in late 1993 during which Saro-Wiwa had allegedly ordered the murder of the four chiefs at Giokoo. The story sounded rehearsed and implausible. Saro-Wiwa pointedly ignored him, keeping his face buried in a United Nations report on military abuses in Ogoniland. One by one, prosecution witnesses took the stand. None would make eye contact with the defendants; each intoned the same rote account.

Midway through the proceedings the judges called a brief recess, and two of Saro-Wiwa's defense attorneys ushered me out of the courtroom. In a dimly lit lounge down the corridor, Saro-Wiwa sat on a couch smoking a pipe, surrounded by a dozen soldiers and policemen. He looked at the policemen nervously, then stood up, balanced himself on his cane, and shook my hand. "Did you get my letter?" he whispered. I nodded. The day before, he had had a ten-page handwritten reply to a dozen questions of mine smuggled out of jail. In it, he denied instigating the murders, claimed his movement was entirely nonviolent, and accused the government of framing him. "These people are criminals," he told me with a dismissive wave. "They're going to find me guilty. So I don't even bother to listen to the testimony. I'm not going to let these goons have any advantage over me." Moments later, the soldiers cut him off and escorted me from the lounge. I returned to the courtroom, but my hope that the proceedings would clarify Saro-Wiwa's complicity in the escalating violence in Ogoniland had evaporated. Whatever transgressions he had committed--and I don't believe that ordering the murder of the four chiefs was among them--Saro-Wiwa would get no fair hearing in this court. Of the nineteen prosecution witnesses called, two of the most damaging would later admit to having been bribed by the junta. In June, the defense team, led by pro-democracy activist Gani Fawehinmi, resigned en masse, claiming that the trial was rigged. Fawehinmi was almost immediately arrested and was held for two weeks.

Six months later, on November 10, Saro-Wiwa and the eight other prisoners who had been duly found guilty were awakened at dawn, chained at their ankles, and driven from Bori military camp to the central prison of Port Harcourt. There they were herded into a bare cell. A few minutes later, Saro-Wiwa was called into the records room. As a sobbing priest performed last rites, he was made to sign a register and surrender his remaining property: a purse in which he kept his pipe and tobacco. Wearing a loose-fitting gown and bathroom slippers, he was handcuffed and shuffled off to the gallows. A few minutes before noon, a black cloth sack was placed over his head and he mounted the gallows. The pit into which Saro-Wiwa fell was only thirteen feet deep, and the fall failed to break his neck. It took him twenty minutes to die. The execution was videotaped, the cassette sent by courier to General Abacha, as proof that the Ogoni leader was really dead.

When the BBC broadcast the news of Saro-Wiwa's hanging, thousands of Ogonis wandered into the streets, disoriented and distraught. Within hours, the Nigerian military deployed 4,000 troops throughout Ogoniland, beating anyone caught mourning in public. In the week following the executions, the United States, Canada, South Africa, and several European countries withdrew their ambassadors. At the behest of British prime minister John Major and South African president Nelson Mandela, the Commonwealth of former British colonies suspended Nigeria. Even the Organization of African Unity, which once had greeted Idi Amin with standing ovations, expressed dismay.

That same week Shell announced it would put up the bulk of $3.8 billion to build a. natural-gas plant on Bonny Island. The announcement suggested that, in ordering the executions, Abacha had taken a calculated gamble. Even from the seclusion of his presidential mansion at Aso Rock, the dictator surely knew the killings would disgust the world and possibly provoke sanctions. Yet, for Abacha, international opprobrium was a fair exchange for internal stability. Abacha probably could have predicted too that despite calls for an oil embargo from civil-rights leaders around the world, neither the United States, which imports almost half of the oil produced by Nigeria, nor any other country found the resolve to do it.

One month after the executions, I returned to Shell's Nigerian headquarters on Lagos Island. Shell was running full-page ads in the New York Times saying: "Some campaigning groups say we should intervene in the political process in Nigeria. But even if we could, we must never do so. Politics is the business of governments and politicians. The world where companies use their economic influence to prop up or bring down governments would be a frightening and bleak one indeed. Shell. We'll keep you in touch with the truth." But despite this bit of corporate agitprop, the company was under siege; the public relations desk was blanketed with faxes from around the world deploring the company's environmental record in the Niger Delta and its failure to prevent Saro-Wiwa's hanging.

General manager Nnaemeka Achebe again welcomed me into his office, though his demeanor was far less chipper than when we had met the previous spring. He pointed out that after the death sentences were announced on October 31, Shell's chairman, Cor Herkstroter, had sent a personal letter to Abacha requesting mercy. Going further than that, Achebe explained, would have compromised Shell's "business principles." "Obviously we have significant economic power in the country," Achebe said. "Yet we must be mindful not to interfere with local politics and be a government of some sort. . . . We're helping the cake grow bigger, and how that the cake is divided is up to the people to decide."

Achebe ticked off a list of development projects Shell was undertaking in the Delta. (In 1995, the company spent $9 million on improvements to the region, three times what it spent in 1990.) At the top. of Achebe's list was the new gas plant, which would liquefy the natural gas, thus reducing pollution. "It's in the best interest of Nigeria for the project not to collapse," Achebe said. "The whole local economy around Bonny will benefit--small contractors, welders, electricians."

Shell's newfound interest in the environment and economy of the Delta is not surprising. During the past three years MOSOP has spawned at least half a dozen imitators, including the Ijaw National Congress and the Movement for Reparation to the Ogbia, and protests have paralyzed Shell's and other oil companies' operations in dozens of Delta locations. in one recent month alone, 5,000 people in Izere besieged Shell oil wells to protest the state of the roads and to demand a water project; hundreds of protesters in neighboring Olomoro seized a Shell flow station and hijacked eighteen vehicles belonging to Seismograph Services Ltd., a Shell contractor; and a convoy of villagers in canoes from Opuama took control of a Chevron drilling platform, demanding compensation for pollution. Protests were costing Shell and the other oil producers millions of lost barrels a year. "Shell is the victim in this," insisted Achebe. "We are caught in a situation where the communities can't get at the real target--the government--to express their grievances, so they attack us."

And so Shell was making amends to these little villages because, for now, it was in its best interest to do so. It was a payoff, a way of buying a measure of peace, of silencing the fax machines and the college kids camping out in front of the company's London headquarters. A few clinics and some asphalt was a small price to pay for continuing to operate without accountability.

In Port Harcourt and Ogoniland, meanwhile, the regime was trying to mute the local press and obliterate any trace of Saro-Wiwa's influence. In the absence of reliable information, rumors flourished. The executioners were said to have poured acid on the corpses of the Ogoni nine to speed their decomposition and discourage Ogoni activists from attempting to take possession of the bodies. When I tried to visit Saro-Wiwa's grave in a weed-choked cemetery in central Port Harcourt, I was escorted away by a phalanx of soldiers and brought before Colonel Dauda Musa Komo, who had supervised the executions.

Komo denied me permission to see the grave but said that the military should be commended for having treated the bodies with respect. "We buried each one in a coffin in his own grave. We could have just thrown them all in a pit," he said. "We have no regrets. We don't owe anybody an explanation."

To counter reports of military repression in Saro-Wiwa's home region, the regime had launched a propaganda campaign and insisted on providing me with a government escort, Fidelis Agbiki, the glib young press secretary to the Rivers State military administrator. "Everything is completely normal in Ogoniland," Agbiki cheerfully assured me as we passed one of the roadblocks set up at intersections throughout the region. "Most Ogonis stopped supporting Saro-Wiwa a long time ago."

But at a primary school in the Ogoni village of Beta, I met Principal M. A. Vite, a dapper, middle-aged man. He fidgeted behind a battered wooden desk in the stifling heat, nervously peering toward the front gate, where Agbiki waited in the government Peugeot. Around Vite sat a dozen Ogoni teachers: shabbily dressed men with solemn faces. "If you have a brother and your brother is killed--that's how we feel," Vite said, as his colleagues nodded and murmured in agreement. "But the moment we express anger they may say, 'Kill all of them.' It's futile to face machine guns with empty hands."

"If the military sees two or three people gathering, they may imprison you. If you wear black, they may beat you," said a science teacher who refused to give his name. "If you carry newspapers, they will seize them. Our headmaster was arrested last week as a warning to us not to discuss Ken in the classroom. Pastors were arrested because they prayed for Ken Saro-Wiwa. They take away people every day."

In the five months since I left Nigeria, the government has jailed hundreds of minority and pro-democracy activists, union and human-rights leaders, journalists, teachers, and lawyers. The State Department has warned that Nigeria's human-rights record is deteriorating, noting that "police and security services commonly engaged in extrajudicial killings and excessive use of force to quell antimilitary and prodemocracy protests." Shell set up a commission to investigate environmental destruction, but the head of the commission quickly resigned, citing his doubts about its impartiality. On March 12, the Clinton Administration announced that it had been trying to persuade U.S. businesses and foreign governments to stop all investment and freeze Nigerian assets. Resistance to this proposal was so strong that the harshest sanction that seemed possible was a ban on Nigerian participation in the Olympics. On that same day, incidentally, Shell announced that one of its joint ventures with the Nigerian government had made a major offshore oil discovery. The discovery was no coincidence. If "Bongo 1" and other deep-water reserves prove commercially viable, Shell and the government could abandon mainland production in turbulent areas. Lacking an effective venue for protest, the plight of the Nigerian people could easily be ignored. In the Delta, the hospitals would crumble, the ramshackle schools would rot and fall, and the half-built roads would slowly be swallowed up by the swamps.

PHOTO (COLOR): GAS FLARES NEAR PORT HARCOURT

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): KEN SARO-WIWA IN 1993

PHOTO (COLOR): SHELL WORKERS CONDUCTING SEISMIC TESTS

MAP: Nigeria

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By Joshua Hammer

Joshua Hammer is the Nairobi bureau chief for Newsweek. He is working on a book of dispatches from Africa.