The Rt Rev John Sentamu, who was today appointed the Church of England's first black Archbishop, has made his name as a passionate voice against racism in Britain.

He was born John Tucker Mugabi Sentamu, the sixth of 13 children, near Kampala in Uganda in 1949. Weighing in at just 4lb at birth he was, a neighbour said, 'smaller than a rat', and the local bishop was immediately called to baptise him in case he failed to survive.

But he defied gloomy predictions and clung to life through the sickness and famine which dominated his childhood, and went on to train as a barrister at Makerere University.

By the time he had become, some 25 years later, a judge in the Uganda High Court, the murderous dictator Idi Amin had massacred his way to power. Sentamu, who had been brought up in an Anglican family, found himself wrestling with the political and spiritual dilemmas generated by the dictatorship.

He has since described himself as a Ugandan Oskar Schindler, and sent ten innocent people to jail after realising it was the only way to save them from summary execution. He said: "The thing to do was to save lives."

He also fell into dispute with the President over the expulsion of Ugandan Asians, and Amin began to mark him down as an agitator and an opponent. An armoured personnel carrier was stationed outside his home to prevent him from trying to flee the country.

It was only by securing a place to study theology at Cambridge University that he managed to assure a passage to England for himself and his wife Margaret, who he married in 1973. The necessary exit papers were granted in 1974 on condition he did not return.

"I got out," he said. "If I had not done so, I would have been dead meat."

However, it was the murder of his friend and mentor, the Ugandan Archbishop Janani Luwum, that cemented his ambition to join the church. When Luwum was arrested and murdered in 1977, Sentamu vowed: ‘You kill my friend, I take his place.'

It was the passionate ideological drive, combined with his charisma, which fuelled Sentamu's rapid rise through the ranks of the Church of England.

He endeared himself by taking a down-to-earth approach to the labyrinthine organisation, once remarking about Church democracy: "When the last trumpet shall sound, a commission will be set up on the significance of the trumpet, the financial implications of that trumpet and for a report to come back in ten years' time."

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