Isaac Theophilus Akunna Wallace-Johnson (1894 – 10 May 1965) was a Sierra Leonean and British West African workers' leader, journalist, activist and politician. Born into a poor Creole family in British Sierra Leone, he emerged as a natural leader in school. After attending United Methodist Collegiate School for two years, he dropped out and took a job as an officer in the customs department in 1913. He was dismissed for helping organize a labour strike, but later reinstated to his position a year later. After resigning from his job, he enlisted as a clerk with the Carrier Corps during World War I. After being demobilised in 1920, Wallace-Johnson moved from job to job, before settling as a clerk in the Freetown municipal government. He claimed to have exposed a corruption scandal, which resulted in the incarceration of top officials, including the mayor. After being fired from this job in 1926, he left Sierra Leone and became a sailor. He joined a national seamen union and it is believed that he also joined the Communist Party. In 1930, he helped form the first trade union in Nigeria and attended the International Trade Union Conference of Negro Workers in Hamburg, where he established a number of contacts. He published articles and edited the Negro Worker, a journal devoted to uniting black workers around the world. He travelled to Moscow, where he claimed to have attended classes on Marxism-Leninism theory, union organisation and political agitation. Within a few months of returning to Nigeria in 1933, he was deported by authorities for his illicit trade union activities. He travelled to the Gold Coast, where he quickly established himself as a political activist and journalist. An agitator, he managed a fund to finance the appeal of the nine African Americans given the death penalty in the Scottsboro case and also campaigned for legislation on workers' compensation and strict safety regulations after the deadly Prestea mining disaster of June 1934. In his writings during this era, Wallace-Johnson glorified the Communist government of the Soviet Union and expressed his disdain for capitalist societies. Soon, the colonial government passed the Sedition Act, a piece of legislation prohibiting the importation of "seditious" literature, which included works from the Negro Worker. In 1934, Wallace-Johnson became the subject of scathing articles in the Gold Coast Independent, in which he was accused of ruining the political atmosphere in the country. After meeting