Léon Zana was a Tunisian Jew born in La Goulette, a suburb of Tunis, on August 16, 1912. He worked at a bank in Tunis and from 1927 to 1933 was a member of the bank employees union. In 1928 he joined the Communist Party, serving in a leadership role from 1932 to 1934. The bank fired him because ofhis political activities, and in September 1934, along with other nationalist and Communist militants, he was deported to the military territories in southern Tunisia. He was freed in September 1935, but was immediately rearrested and sent to the prison of Borj le Bœuf (now Bordj-Bouguiba) in the south.

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