Isaac Wallace-Johnson

Isaac Theophilus Akunna Wallace-Johnson (* 1894 - May 10, 1965 in Ghana ) was a Sierra Leonean trade unionist , journalist , activist and politician .

Life path

Wallace-Johnson was born into a poor kriofamily . Even when he was still at school he stood up for others and quickly became a leader. He studied at the United Methodist Collegiate School for two years before Wallace-Johnson accepted a job at the customs office in 1913. He was suspended for organizing a strike , but hired again a year later.

After his dismissal there Wallace-Johnson joined the First World War the Carrier Corps on. After the war and disarmament, he found employment with the Freetown City Council in 1920 . In 1926 he was released and hired on a merchant ship. At that time he joined the seaman's union and the communist party. In 1930 he co-founded the first trade union in Nigeria . Walle Johnson took part in the International Trade Union Conference of Negro Workers in Hamburg . He has published numerous articles on black labor rights and was the publisher of Negro Worker magazine .

Wallace-Johnson returned to Nigeria in 1933 and was expelled from the country within months for forming illegal activist groups. He then moved to the Gold Coast , where he quickly gained a high reputation as an activist and journalist. He campaigned for black rights. There he founded the West African Youth League (WAYL) in 1935, which was able to gain a large following throughout British West Africa in the years to come.

2000 Leones note

Wallace-Johnson returned to his native Sierra Leone three years later. He founded various trade unions and political groups and published a newspaper. On September 1, 1939 he was arrested under the recently enacted martial law due to the Second World War . He was sentenced to 12 months' imprisonment without a proper hearing. Wallace-Johnson were finally released after five years in 1944. He immediately went back into activism and transferred the WAYL to the National Council of Sierra Leone . He founded another party that devoted itself to Pan-Africanism and turned away from radicalism .

In 1960 he was one of the delegates negotiating the independence of Sierra Leone.

Wallace-Johnson died in a traffic accident in Ghana in May 1965.

It is depicted on the front of the 2000 Leones banknote .

literature

• Hakim Adi, Marika Sherwood: Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora Since 1787. Routledge, New York 2003, ISBN 0-415-17352-3 .
• John Cartwright: Politics in Sierra Leone, 1947–67. University of Toronto Press, Torongo 1970, ISBN 0-8020-1687-1 .
• LaRay Denzer: Wallace-Johnson and the Sierra Leone Labor Crisis of 1939. In: African Studies Review , Issue 25, No. 2/3, 1982, pp. 159-183.
• James Hooker: Black Revolutionary: George Padmore's Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism. Praeger Publishers, New York 1967.
• Martin Kilson: Political Change in a West African State: A Study of the Modernization Process in Sierra Leone. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1966, ISBN 0-8020-1687-1 .
• Leo Spitzer, LaRay Denzer: ITA Wallace-Johnson and the West African Youth League. In: The International Journal of African Historical Studies , 1973, Issue 6, No. 3, pp. 413–452.
• Leo Spitzer, LaRay Denzer: ITA Wallace-Johnson and the West African Youth League. Part II: The Sierra Leone Period, 1938–1945. In: The International Journal of African Historical Studies , 1973, Issue 6, No. 4, pp. 565-601.
• Carol Polsgrove: Ending British Rule in Africa. Writers in a Common Cause. Manchester University Press, Manchester 2012, ISBN 978-0-7190-8901-5 .