A Kenyan lawyer once walked into the International Criminal Court in The Hague and filed a case against Israel, Italy, Emperor Tiberius, King Herod, and the entire Sanhedrin for the unlawful arrest, torture, and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The year was 2013. The crime was two thousand years old. The main witness was the victim himself, who had not been seen in court since the first century. And the lawyer, Dola Indidis, was completely serious.
He named Israel as a defendant because the crucifixion happened on what is now Israeli territory. He named Italy because it is the successor state to the Roman Empire, and the Romans supplied the nails. He named Emperor Tiberius because he was the boss. He named King Herod because he was the local administrator who signed off on the execution. He named the Jewish elders and the Sanhedrin because they provided the religious justification. It was the most ambitious class action lawsuit in human history, and the only thing missing was a notary public who could verify the signatures of the deceased.
Indidis did not want money. He wanted justice. Specifically, he wanted Jesus’ conviction formally quashed. He wanted the record corrected. He wanted the inscription removed from the cross. He argued that the trial of Jesus was a miscarriage of justice from start to finish. No proper legal representation. A biased jury. A judge who washed his hands instead of doing his job. And a sentence that was cruel, unusual, and permanent. Indidis said he was acting on behalf of Jesus, who had no one to speak for him during the original proceedings. Two thousand years later, a Kenyan lawyer decided to fix that.
The International Criminal Court looked at the paperwork, looked at the calendar, and politely declined. They explained that their jurisdiction generally covers crimes committed after 2002, which is roughly nineteen hundred and eighty-eight years too late for this particular matter. They also noted that serving a subpoena on Emperor Tiberius would require an exhumation, a resurrection, or a very good medium. The Vatican, when asked for comment, essentially told Indidis to leave it alone. The case was already settled in a higher court, they suggested, and the defendant had already served his sentence and been released on his own recognizance three days later.
But here is what makes the story African. Indidis was not chasing publicity. He was not running for office. He was a former spokesperson for the Kenyan Judiciary who looked at the most famous trial in history and saw a procedural failure. No defense attorney. No appeal. No habeas corpus. Just a man from Nazareth dragged before a kangaroo court and executed by the state. Indidis saw a Kenyan lawyer’s duty to represent the unrepresented, even if the client had been dead for twenty centuries.
The rest of the world laughed. Legal blogs called it frivolous. Commentators asked about the statute of limitations. Social media made memes about Jesus needing a lawyer and the lawyer needing a time machine. But in Kenya, and across Africa, the story landed differently. It was absurd, yes. But it was also deeply African.
An African lawyer looked at the most powerful empires in history, the Roman Empire and the modern state of Israel, and said you still have to answer for what you did to this man. He did not care that Tiberius was dust. He did not care that the Roman Republic no longer existed. He filed the papers anyway.
That is the same energy that took colonial land cases to the Privy Council. That is the same energy that hauled Britain to court for Mau Mau atrocities. That is the same energy that drags Israel to the International Court of Justice for genocide in Gaza. The scale is different. The instinct is identical.
Dola Indidis never got his day in court. The case went nowhere legally. But it went everywhere culturally. It became a reminder that Africans do not forget. Not the crucifixion. Not the partition. Not the slavery. Not the extraction. We have long memories and we keep receipts. Sometimes those receipts are two thousand years old and the defendant is a skeleton. We file them anyway.
The Hague may not do resurrections. But Dola Indidis proved that African lawyers will resurrect any case if the principle is worth it.
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