JOHN MORRIS, working as a young English teacher in Uganda, took pity on the scrawny kid who walked 12 miles barefoot to and from secondary school in Kampala each day. He never dreamed that the confident, laughing child destined to fulfil his dream of being a barrister in Uganda would end up as Archbishop of York in the Church of England.
Dr John Sentamu remembers Mr Morris for buying him a bicycle and keeping him supplied with inner tubes when the tyres gave way on rough tracks that passed for roads.
Mr Morris went on to become ordained himself, at the age of 58, and now, back in England, works as chaplain at Twyford School in the Winchester diocese.
“His [Dr Sentamu's] qualities are leadership and straight talking,” Mr Morris says. The Church of England is in great need of straight talkers. John does not mince words. He gets straight to the point. He’s a very alive person.”
Mr Morris took him and other children to the local Anglican church each Sunday. Dr Sentamu’s vocation came after his friend, Archbishop Janani Luwum, was murdered, making him vow: “You kill my friend, I take his place.”
Dr Sentamu remembers Mr Morris as one of the teachers and missionaries in Uganda who educated him in what it means to be English. “As I was being raised as one of 13 children in a four bedroom house I learnt that you are totally dependent on one another and not a single individualistic sort of person. The missionaries I saw and the teachers I saw in my country were not bringing an individualistic thing. It was always a communal thing.”
Without the English, Dr Sentamu says, his life would have been of a different order.“I come from a clan called the Buffalo clan. Its responsibilities are to be the guardians and protectors of the king. Sentamu means the one who keeps the king’s fire burning. If I had not gone to university I would be outside the palace stoking the fire. That would have been my job, stoking the fire. I just hope with Rowan [Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury] I will be stoking the fire.”
He says the Ugandan experience was preferable to that of French colonies. “What the English tried to do in Uganda was not a replication of the English way of life. They seriously looked at Ugandan culture and tried to have a blend of what was good in Ugandan culture as well as the English.”
He arrived from Uganda in 1974 at the height of Idi Amin’s terrible persecution. A High Court judge, he had been beaten severely by a hit squad and his life was in danger after he ignored an order to deliver a not guilty verdict on a cousin of the dictator. He was able to escape because he had a place at Cambridge to read theology.
“I had been here four months and because I was from the Commonwealth I actually voted for the first time in my life. I was not able to do it in Uganda.”
Now a naturalised British citizen — he finds that an “odd” word, as though he was not natural before — he compares his experience with what is happening in France. “I feel what France has not done is to make those who are living there feel they are part of, feel they could be citizens. They speak French but they know they are not.”
At his enthronement, he has decided to make public what the diocese wanted in their new archbishop. “They were looking for someone who would be a leader in mission, together with the Archbishop of Canterbury.” His aim will be to put English culture back at the heart of English identity, and Christianity back at the heart of English culture. “At heart I have been a creature of English culture. If the English culture does not rediscover itself afresh, that is what is going to lead in the end to these extreme political parties.”
He imitates the average English vicar praising God with an unenthusiastic allelujah to a near empty church. Then he gives his version, thumping the table and crying allelujah to the skies. The miserable, ancient cottage at Lambeth Palace where we are talking, with its false ceiling, laminate doors, storage freezers and cold white lights, suddenly feels an awful lot hotter, a bit more Africa than England.
I tell the archbishop this and he looks momentarily shocked. “I was raised an Anglican on 1662 [the Book of Common Prayer],” he says.
“The gospel I got in my country was so good. I am simply telling the English, it is my job now, to simply remind you of what you taught me.”
A MULTITUDE OF VIEWS
April 3, 2004
Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, says in a Times interview that multiculturalism is outdated as it encourages “separateness” between communities and calls for a greater emphasis on integration. He says: “We need to assert that there is a core of Britishness”
August 3, 2005
Speaking after the July 7 bombs, David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary and Tory leadership candidate, calls for a re-examination of multiculturalism and says Britain should learn from the US, “where pride in the nation’s values is much more prevalent among minorities than here”
September 22, 2005
Trevor Phillips says that Britons are “sleepwalking our way to segregation”. Citing the racial inequality highlighted by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, he says: “For all of us who care about racial equality and integration, America is not our dream, but our nightmare”
October 12, 2005
Lee Jasper, the Mayor of London’s director of policing and equality, says commentators have been too quick to dismiss multiculturalism — “a model that actually works” — and calls Trevor Phillips’s remarks counter-productive. “Everyone is entitled to celebrate their own culture as long as they do not prevent others from doing so,” he writes
October 24, 2005
David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham, marking Black History Month, also defends multiculturalism, saying: “I am very nervous at the haste with which multiculturalism is being sent to the knacker’s yard, as if it had achieved nothing for this country. It is all well and good to call for greater integration. But people from different backgrounds cannot integrate unless they have some sense of where each other is coming from . . . ”
November 1, 2005
After the Lozells riots, Lord Ouseley, former CRE chair, accuses it of focusing on “soft cultural questions” rather than deprivation and discrimination
