Back in 1999, he was a junior bishop in east London and had just served on the official inquiry into the killing and the investigation. He returned to the Caribbean island this week at the invitation of its government and the Anglican church, now the second most senior cleric in the Church of England, just weeks after two of the teenager’s killers were finally jailed.
But, speaking during a brief break on his nine-day visit, Dr Sentamu said: “The fact that two on joint enterprise have been convicted when the inquiry said there was a possibility of five or six, still there’s some four in my book that haven’t really faced questioning.
“At least we have recommended that the double jeopardy rule doesn’t apply if there is fresh evidence. The Court of Appeal decided there was in the case of Dobson and I think the same would be true of the others, should fresh evidence come. I don’t think the whole thing has been wound up.”
Although he believes many organisations have made progress over the past decade in tackling the “institutional racism” identified by the inquiry, some have avoided it. “Those that did it, there is some kind of change. Football never did it, so I’m not surprised [by allegations of racism on the pitch].
“I didn’t hear that the media ever said let’s put a mirror to ourselves and see whether there isn’t this tendency of stereotyping, or being prejudiced, of advantaging people because they went to the same school.”
The Archbishop said he never encountered racism from fellow clergy in his rise through the ranks of the Church of England. A lawyer and judge in his native Uganda, he fled Idi Amin’s violent and repressive regime in 1974 and served as a parish priest in south London after training for the priesthood in Cambridge. He was promoted from Bishop of Stepney to Bishop of Birmingham and then Archbishop of York in less than a decade.
But he did have to deal with racist parishioners. “When I was a vicar there was a lady who didn’t want me to take her husband’s funeral because I was black. I took one funeral and at the end a man said to me, 'Why did my father deserve to be buried by a black monkey?’ We received letters with excrement in.”
While the focus has often been on the introduction of homosexual and female clergy, Dr Sentamu is aware that the Church must do more to avoid its leadership being solely white and middle class.
“I used to chair the committee for minority ethnic Anglican concerns, and we seemed to be making some progress but that now seems to be going backwards. Where we have lost out is black people who had been realised Anglicans, who are now joining Pentecostal churches. That’s a huge drain.”
He said white working-class parishioners were also poorly represented in the Church’s leadership, often being relegated to making tea after services, and highlighted support groups for single mothers and replacing theological books with audio versions as ways to help disadvantaged groups.
“The Church should be a sign of the kingdom of heaven and should be telling us what it will look like. Heaven is not going to be full of just black people, just working-class people, just middle-class people, it’s going to be, in the words of Desmond Tutu, a rainbow people of God in all its diversity.”
If Dr Sentamu returns again to the island in the sun, it could well be as Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the 80 million-strong Anglican Communion. He is the bookies’ favourite to move into Lambeth Palace if, as expected, Dr Rowan Williams returns to his natural home of academia later this year.
Dr Sentamu is better known and more popular than any other challenger for the post, but not just for his work on racial justice. Despite being 62 years old and having had his appendix taken out last year after suffering a serious infection, he retains an irrepressible sense of humour and eye for a good publicity shot. The Archbishop has kept smiling as he jumped out of an aeroplane with the RAF, slept in a tent in York Minster (years before the Occupy crowd had the idea) and let Chris Evans into his palace of Bishopthorpe to host a Christmas show for Radio 2.
His image among England’s black churchgoers cannot have been harmed by the sight of him and his wife Margaret talking to Rastafarians and tucking into ackee and saltfish in the Caribbean, although it may have seemed incongruous to some at a time when his fellow Lords Spiritual were debating child poverty in cold and rainy Westminster.
But back at his 1950s hotel in the coastal town of Ocho Rios, where he struck up an unlikely friendship with the actor Rupert Everett, Dr Sentamu is wary of appearing to harbour ambitions for the top job. “Everybody who has gone to York, there is not a single archbishop who has not loved it. Those who have gone from York to Canterbury have always wondered 'what was this all about?’
“Unfortunately, the job in Lambeth pushes the person in a hundred and one directions and I’m ever so happy where I am really.”
Away from the internal affairs of the Church, Dr Sentamu has started to put pressure on the Government to reform care of the elderly and children.
He was particularly moved this week by a visit to St Mary’s Preparatory School in Montpelier, which he had helped fund, where pupils stood proudly to sing Jamaica’s national anthem and their school song in a half-built classroom where maths questions were chalked on to the plywood walls.
Another memorable destination was the Amy Muschett care home, run for the past half-century by the local Anglican church, where the 10 elderly residents were able to sit and talk on a bright and airy terrace rather than watching television alone in stuffy bedrooms, as too often happens in Britain. “I thought the dignity of older people mattered. It was set up as a safety net for anybody who could not be cared for at all by their relations and I thought that was fantastic.”
Preaching in churches on former plantations, and others where plaques still commemorate English slave owners, the Archbishop said he believed the Jamaican people had freed themselves from their history through their faith, their hope and the joyfulness that comes of living in a warm, sunny country blessed with beautiful scenery.
But 50 years after independence, Jamaica’s new prime minister, Portia Simpson Miller, has said she wants to break all ties with her country’s former colonial masters by abandoning the Queen as official head of state. The Archbishop, who met the prime minister and the governor-general in Kingston yesterday, said: “I’d urge all those wanting to leave the Commonwealth, to me it’s not a sign of growing up — if you feel fully independent you should be in there to exercise greater influence and democratic principles.”
The extent of his influence over politics will become apparent over the coming months after his declaration that the Government does not have the power to legalise gay marriage.
Dr Sentamu insists he will ultimately be judged by the same criteria as Christian ministers of any rank. “In the end, I’m not going to be asked which jobs did you do or didn’t do well, I’m simply going to be asked how much did I love Christ and cared for his people. Then it doesn’t matter if you’re a parish priest, archdeacon, bishop or archbishop because the following of Jesus as a disciple is the first priority. If you don’t concentrate on that you’re going to end up absolutely disappointed.”
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