ABSTRACT
Two traditions of citizen soldier service developed in nineteenth-century South Africa: the Boer commando and the British volunteer regiment. The nineteenth-century wars between the British ruled Cape Colony and the neighboring Xhosa groups produced a number of volunteer and ad hoc colonial military units. Despite some stunning initial successes, the conventional warfare of the first part of the conflict did not suit the commando system. In what would become South Africa, the concept of civilians performing part-time military service originated in the early eighteenth-century Cape and applied to both whites and free blacks. It also gave the Commandant of Volunteers the authority to co-ordinate and organizes the colony's volunteer units. In the early twentieth century the Union of South Africa, with a very small full-time defence force, relied heavily on citizen soldiers who were organized into primarily English-speaking regiments in towns and primarily Afrikaans-speaking commandos in rural areas.
