he role of law as an instrument of colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa seems to have received inadequate attention in the historiography while on the other hand, the extraction of African labour has received signifi cant coverage. This has meant that the relationship between punishment and labour has rarely been thoroughly investigated. Under colonial rule transplanted law was the constitutive law of the state. But amongst the panoply of laws used to facilitate colonial control over African territories, it was criminal law that was more directly employed in the colonial enterprise for purposes of social, political and economic control. This paper discusses how criminal law was used to facilitate labour extraction in colonial Botswana, which served as a labour reserve for the South African economy for much of the twentieth century.

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