Ogoniland — 1,050 sq km in present-day Rivers State, home to about 500,000 Ogoni people — sat on Shell's Bomu, Bodo, Yorla, Korokoro and Ebubu oilfields, which had since 1958 produced an estimated $30bn in oil but left the local Ogoni without piped water, mains electricity or paved access to most of their villages. The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) was launched on 26 August 1990 at Bori, with the publication of the Ogoni Bill of Rights demanding political autonomy within Nigeria, control of Ogoni resources, and reparations for thirty years of unremediated pollution. Its President was the playwright and television producer Ken Saro-Wiwa.
On 4 January 1993 — Ogoni National Day — an estimated 300,000 Ogoni marched peacefully through Bori, the largest indigenous-rights demonstration in Nigerian history. Shell suspended operations in Ogoniland and has not resumed them to date. General Sani Abacha's government deployed the Rivers State Internal Security Task Force (RSISTF) under Major Paul Okuntimo from 1993; an internal RSISTF memo of May 1994 (later leaked to the Body Shop campaign) recommended 'ruthless military operations' and 'wasting operations during MOSOP and other gatherings.'
On 21 May 1994 four Ogoni elders — Chiefs Edward Kobani, Albert Badey, Theophilus Orage and Samuel Orage — were killed at Giokoo by a faction of the MOSOP youth wing during an internal split. The Federal Government blamed Saro-Wiwa and the MOSOP leadership directly. On 22 May 1994 he was arrested with eight others. The Civil Disturbances Special Tribunal under Justice Ibrahim Auta convicted them; their conviction was ratified by the Provisional Ruling Council on 8 November 1995, and on 10 November 1995 Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Eight (Saturday Dobee, Felix Nuate, Nordu Eawo, Paul Levura, Daniel Gbokoo, Barinem Kiobel, John Kpuine and Baribor Bera) were hanged at Port Harcourt Prison. Last words of Saro-Wiwa, on the scaffold: 'Lord take my soul, but the struggle continues.'
The Commonwealth suspended Nigeria within forty-eight hours. Shell faced and ultimately settled (Kiobel v Shell, 2009 — $15.5m without admission of liability) US civil litigation under the Alien Tort Statute. The MOSOP playbook — non-violent mass mobilisation against an extractive industry, met with judicial murder of its leadership — produced the immediate radicalisation of the next generation of Delta youth, the formation of the Niger Delta Peoples' Volunteer Force (NDPVF) under Mujahid Dokubo-Asari in 2003, and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) in 2005. The Ogoni Eight remain officially unrehabilitated by the Federal Republic.