Anglican Church.As predicted by New African three years ago (see NA, March 2003), the Ugandan archbishop, Dr John Tucker Mugabi Sentamu, 56, who fled to Britain in 1974 to escape Idi Amin's rule, made history on 30 November 2005 when he became the first person of African descent to be installed as Archbishop of York
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "It is a fair bet," reported The Guardian's Stephen Bates Bates , Katherine Lee 1859-1929. American educator and writer best known for her poem "America the Beautiful," written in 1893 and revised in 1904 and 1911. , "that, in all its 700 years, York Minster has never seen an installation of an archbishop quite like it, with African dancing in the nave and rhythmic chanting shivering the medieval tracery tracery, bands or bars of stone, wood, or other material, either subdividing an opening or standing in relief against a wall and forming an ornamental pattern of solid members and open spaces. . It is an even safer bet that it has never seen an archbishop of the Church of England pounding the bongo bongo (bŏng`gō), spiral-horned antelope, Boocercus eurycerus, found in jungles and thick bamboo forests of equatorial Africa. Shy, elusive animals, bongos never emerge into the open and are seldom seen; they browse singly or in small drums at his own inauguration or anyone else's for that matter ... But then the Church of England has never had a black archbishop before. [On 30 November,] the Most Reverend and Right Honourable Dr John Sentamu, Ugandan-born and once an asylum seeker came into his own as if by divine providence. Now Lord Archbishop, Primate of England and Metropolitan, he follows in the footsteps of 96 predecessors with names like Eborius, St Paulinus and Ecgbeorbt." A former barrister and high court judge in Uganda, Sentamu, the sixth of 13 children, studied theology at Cambridge and was ordained in 1979. |
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