Early Life
Wallace-Johnson was born to poor Creole parents in Wilberforce Sierra Leone, a village adjoining the capital city, Freetown. His father was a farmer, while his mother was a fishwife who sold her goods in markets in neighboring villages. Many of his relatives held low-status jobs involving craftsmanship, carpentry and masonry. His poor upbringing and low social status influenced his understanding and empathy of the working class, as seen in his early association with communism and later, his leadership in the West African labor movement.
Wallace-Johnson received his primary education at Centenary Tabernacle Day School before entering United Methodist Collegiate School in 1911. There, he engaged in numerous leadership activities. On one such occasion, he led his classmates in a protest against unreasonable punishment by school authorities. He also edited the school's newspaper, Wall Paper. He dropped out two years later to support his family. He was first employed as a temporary outdoor officer at the customs department. Soon, he became a permanent employee of the department. He became involved in a labor strike for increased pay and better working conditions. It is widely believed that Wallace-Johnson led the strike, but this fact remains uncertain. All employees involved in the strike were dismissed, but reinstituted to their jobs a year later after the Secretary of State for the Colonies assessed the case. During the one year break, he held jobs as a surveyor, farmer, fisher and a clerk in a law office. He was very popular as a lay preacher amongst rural villagers. He was interested in joining the ministry, but he lacked the proper education needed to enter the occupation. All during this time, he wrote articles in the Aurora, a newspaper edited by H. C. Bankole-Bright. Wallace-Johnson considered Bankole-Bright to be the most influential person in his life at the time. Following a 1938 feud, Bankole-Bright would became Wallace-Johnson's political nemesis.
A year after being reinstated to his job in the customs department, he quit and enlisted as a clerk for the Carrier Corps during World War I. During the war, he served with a British infantry during military campaigns in Cameroon, East Africa and the Middle East. Wallace-Johnson received exposure to the world outside his tiny village. After being demobilized in 1920, he moved from job to job, unable to find a comfortable niche to settle in. While working as a clerk in the Freetown municipal government, a corruption scandal erupted, involving the misappropriations of funds and equipment by top government officials, including the mayor. In his pamphlet regarding municipal governance in Freetown, A Cloud of Doom, Wallace-Johnson took credit for exposing the corruption. His exact role in the affair is not known, but no Sierra Leoneans ever challenged the veracity of his claim. In the aftermath of the scandal, the British revoked Freetown's rights to complete municipal self-government, believing that Africans, no matter how educated they were, could not govern themselves.
After being fired from his municipal government job in 1926, Wallace-Johnson left Sierra Leone to pursue other activities. According to Spitzer & Denzer 1973a, biographical details regarding Wallace-Johnson's activities during this time period are hard to discern, as Wallace-Johnson contradicted himself in his autobiographical notes and his personal reminisces. He took a job as either a sailor on an American ocean liner sailing between the United States and Africa or as an engine hand for Elder Dempster Lines; in an interview, he stated the former, while in a lecture at the Easter School he claimed the latter. He normally traveled to English-speaking areas, but on occasion, he journeyed to French, Spanish and Portuguese territories on the African continent. He joined the United Kingdom National Seamen's Union and supposedly edited the Seafarer, a newsletter which he and other black sailors distributed among ship crews. During his time off, he studied the working conditions for employees at ports along the western coast of Africa. It is believed that he joined the Communist Party during his time as a sailor, as the party had a history of recruiting among sailors who frequently visited seamen's clubs in port cities. In 1929, he began working in Sekondi as a clerk in a trading company, but only held the job for a year before traveling to Nigeria.
Read more about this topic: I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson
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