WHEN he was a magistrate in Idi Amin’s Uganda, John Tucker Mugabi Sentamu once sent ten innocent people to jail.

Years later, from the safety of Cambridge, he explained that it had been for their own good; had he freed them they would have been summarily executed by the butcher’s henchmen.

For the newly appointed Archbishop of York, life as a lawyer in an African country plunged into lawlessness was his personal equivalent of Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace; his faith was tested in the flames, and was not found wanting.

Asked about the ethics of sending the innocent to prison, he pointed to his Christian faith. “Justice is often not just innocent or guilty; justice is often doing what is right.”

Born one of 13 children in 1949 in a village near Kampala, Sentamu trained as a lawyer and was posted to Gulu in the northwest of the country, homeland of previous president Milton Obote, whose kinsmen Amin was wont to victimise, harass and kill.

His ten innocents were eventually freed and managed to flee the country, but Sentamu’s own position became less tenable. Amin made plain that he regarded Sentamu as a dangerous agitator by positioning an armoured personnel carrier outside his house, and sending hired thugs to administer a severe beating. When the country’s chief justice and its Anglican archbishop were murdered in quick succession, Sentamu and his wife Margaret knew that they had to flee.

Their escape route was a place Sentamu had been offered in 1974 to read theology at Cambridge. They were allowed out on the condition that they return; they are, to our considerable benefit, still here.

He found on his arrival that Britain was a land of imperfections, one of which was racism. He recalls being stopped in the street at least eight times by police officers simply because of his colour.

Those who know him speak of his passion for the gospel and for his ministry. Yesterday he wore a cross given to him by churchmen in El Salvador after the murder of that country’s Archbishop Romero. The new incumbent of York is clearly on the side of the martyrs.

With a past forged in such adversity, the Church of England’s first African bishop was always going to be listened to when he was appointed to Stepney in 1996 after a pastoral career in Brixton. He had little fear after a life under Amin.

He condemned the Church for being run by a white elite, a remark which made him enemies at the time but which in the long term has probably won him friends. He excoriated Tony Blair for the Iraq war, an act he saw as an incentive to criminality on the streets of Britain.

He is a soldier of the Lord most prominently in the battle against racism. He sat on the inquiry into the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence and chaired a review into the murder of the 10-year-old Nigerian boy Damilola Taylor.

The father of two grown-up children, Sentamu is a man who puts his money where his mouth is, donating one-fifth of his episcopal salary to the church collection plate and asking his wife to do the same. They may look askance at such profligate disposal of brass in his new Yorkshire posting, but they should love him for his plain speaking.

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