I was recently hospitalised- not with Covid-19 . Now sitting at home slowly recovering I am putting pen to paper to trace my life back from when I went to the Royal Technical College.
I was among the first batch of students who joined the Royal Technical College of East Africa in May 1956. I enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture and was there until term ending 1959 when I started working for Vamos and Partners Architects.
MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY - ROMANO SEQUEIRA
Where do I begin? For this purpose, I guess my acceptance at the Royal Technical College of East Africa in Nairobi in May 1956, in the Department of Architecture.
As this was a new university, and we were the first batch of students with a new group of Professors and Lecturers from England, the university decided that we should all arrive at the university a couple of months early. This would accustom us to university life and get us to meet the professors and lecturers that would be guiding us in the next five years in our chosen profession.
Majority of us were mature students who had completed our schooling a few years earlier; some of us had attended universities and colleges in India for a few years, others had been in the work force, and the rest directly from having finished their schooling ‘still wet behind the ears’.
The two months before the first year was to begin, was mostly all play on the sports field, visits to the university and getting to know one another and our Lecturers. The syllabus that we would be following would be a course from the Royal Institute of British Architects, with the exam papers set in England and corrected locally and in London. The big problem we were facing was that the syllabus was for conditions in England meaning for snow and winter, and as we were in the tropics this entailed a double study course to be employable locally.
Braz Menezes was in the first batch of students to gain entry to the RTC. He was in the Faculty of Architecture, at the RTC for five years. He has a had a prolific career as an architect in Kenya, a 22 year stint with the World Bank and then, in his retirement as a writer with work like his Matata Trilogy.
His work was recently chronicled in an article by Milena Marques-Zachariah that appeared in Canadian Chronicles on October 15, 2019 shown below.