Informing the experience of ordinary soldiers and their families, the military culture of Britain's West African army evolved through periods of instability and decentralization separated by a few decades of stabilization and centralization. During its formative years in the late nineteenth century, Britain's West African military was unstable and dispersed, comprising separate paramilitary units made up of many men who had escaped enslavement and enslaved men indirectly or directly purchased by British agents at Cape Coast, Lagos, or interior slave markets who were transformed into colonial soldiers. This situation often put the early British paramilitary forces at odds with local West African elites who lost their labor to the colonial army, and slaves who had become soldiers exacted revenge on former oppressors both real and imagined. In this period, British officials and ordinary West Africans applied the term “Hausa soldiers” to the men of diverse hinterland origins (and usually some past association with slavery) who joined Britain's West African constabularies in what is now Nigeria and Ghana. The term “Hausa soldier” did not exist in Sierra Leone, although some of the same processes related to formerly enslaved men were evident. At the same time, men from other communities enlisted in these colonial forces, including large numbers of Yoruba from western Nigeria and almost every ethnic group of Sierra Leone.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Muslim troops dominated the ranks in Nigeria, the Gold Coast, and the Gambia (and formed a sizable minority of those in Sierra Leone), a simplified and adaptive form of Islam developed in Britain's West African army supported by military imams and occasionally Arabic teachers and mosques. While a racial hierarchy dominated these colonial paramilitaries all led by British commanders, a few prominent “native officers” helped with recruiting and provided local knowledge important for military operations. Although similar to the institution of “native officers” in British colonial India, there were far fewer such leaders in West Africa. Fighting numerous wars of conquest that expanded British rule inland, these West African paramilitary regiments set up a network of many small military outposts to supervise subjugated populations, impose colonial policies like taxation, and quickly suppress resistance.