coastweek.com

JOAQUIM ALBERT SEQUEIRA

teacher, orator, composer, singer and writer
.

Coastweek -- Kenya-born Joaquim Albert Sequeira, popularly known as 'Jock' Sequeira, died last month in London.

He was an Education Officer in Mombasa where he worked for 20 years until his retirement in 1965 when he and his family settled in Wimbledon, London.

Jock was not only a teacher, having qualified with a B.A. and B.T. from Bombay University, but an orator, composer, singer and writer.

He is remembered as a great teacher and for his three published books:

Bubbles in The Air,
The Home and School and
With a Pipe In my Mouth.

He taught in Bombay at the prestigious Jesuit St. Mary’s High School, Mazagon, alma mater of

Asia's outstanding journalist, editor and commentator, Frank Moraes,
internationally famous conductor Zubin Mehta,
advertising celebrity Frank Simoes and in Kenya,
Mirabeau da Gama Rose, senior partner of Shapley Barret, advocates and chairman of a score of blue chip companies including the commercial Bank of Africa.

Coastweek -- Mombasa
Education Officer Joaquim
Albert Sequeira,
popularly known as
'Jock' Sequeira.

In the Coast Province Jock was a senior teacher in a number of schools and a vice principal.

For his epitaph Jock, who was a human computer with apt quotations for all occasions, selected his hero with Abraham Lincoln’s epitaph:

‘All things considered,
he was a good man as men go,
and as men go, he went!’

At his funeral Mass in the Jesuit parish, St. Winifreds Church, Wimbledon, the all-Goan choir with Goan musicians and the large congregation sang his nostalgic composition:

Vetam, vetam

which, in Konkani, means l am going, l am going.

The funeral eulogy was emotionally delivered by Mervyn Maciel from Sutton, Surrey, who spoke of Jock as ‘my dear cousin'.

A person with whom Mervyn shared the family distinction of being an orator, singer and writer of the book of his Kenya memoirs 'Bwana Karani'.