October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.

John Sentamu was born in 1949 near Kampala, Uganda, the sixth of thirteen children. He retired in June 2020 as Archbishop of York, the first black Archbishop in the United Kingdom.

Sentamu studied law in Uganda, and became an advocate of the Supreme Court there until 1974, being briefly a judge of the High Court. In 1973, he married his wife Margaret. Three weeks later, he incurred the wrath of the dictator Idi Amin and was detained for 90 days. In a speech in 2007, he described how during that time he had been “kicked around like a football and beaten terribly”, saying “the temptation to give up hope of release was always present”. He fled his home country to arrive in the United Kingdom in 1974.

Sentamu read theology at Selwyn College Cambridge. He studied for ordination at Ridley Hall Cambridge, and was ordained in 1979. In 1996 he was consecrated as the area Bishop of Stepney and in 2002 moved to the position of Bishop of Birmingham. He served as advisor to the Stephen Lawrence judicial inquiry, and chaired the Damilola Taylor review.

In 2005 he was appointed to the position of Archbishop of York. He has held the Chancellorship of the universities of York St John and of Cumbria, and has been awarded a number of honorary degrees and doctorates.

There have been eight occasions on which a Church of England bishop has been stopped and questioned by the police, and on every occasion it was John Sentamu. He has been critical of the standards of ‘reasonable grounds to suspect’ applied by police.

Sentamu famously cut up his dog collar live on television in protest against the Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, vowing not to wear it again until Mugabe was no longer in office. He returned to the television studio ten years later to resume his dog collar on Mugabe’s leaving office.

Sentamu has a history of being outspoken on a large number of issues, in some cases adopting very traditionalist church positions such as opposition to same-sex marriage. In 2016 he was one of six bishops accused by a survivor of child sexual abuse by a clergyman of procedural misconduct for failure to respond appropriately to his disclosures.

While Archbishop of York, Sentamu had a place in the House of Lords by virtue of his church office. However, during Black History Month this year he was snubbed on his retirement by failing to be granted an automatic life peerage like his predecessors.

(On a personal note, John Sentamu is the only person in my list of 31 people of colour for this month whom I have actually met. I was a student at Selwyn College Cambridge at around the same time as him, and he and his wife and their first child were even guests at my wedding in 1979.)

More about John Sentamu at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sentamu