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advantage. Today, the collection of a variety of informal taxes by customary authorities, often in the peripheries rather than the urban parts of African countries, remains a fact of life for many people on the continent. As a result, there is a patchwork of direct tax regimes throughout many African countries, which might in turn inform a broad spectrum of ideas of citizenship, the state, and how the state relates to different types of people. For instance, it is entirely plausible that people in parts of Sierra Leone’s peripheries prefer the ‘decentralized despotism’ of chiefs and other traditional authorities, to paraphrase Mahmood Mamdani, to that of the state. And, these informal tax collection practices in different parts of African states might serve a myriad of other socio-political functions that governments or aid agencies fail to adequately appreciate, let alone stamp out. For instance, recent historical research on West African boundaries and state making highlights some of the ways in which taxes shape how armed groups and criminal networks within the peripheries operate (P. Nugent, Boundaries, Communities and State-making in West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2019)). The other, related, critique of the authors’ limited attention to historical detail centres on the complex ways in which Western scholars have dictated how African governments should levy taxes to finance local governments. In British-occupied Africa, Frederick Lugard and Margery Perham – influential thinkers on British colonial administration – provided explanations for how taxes were meant to become the heart of local governments. Taxes were considered essential for ‘civilizing’ customary authorities who would then teach their people the value of the state. Indeed, Margery Perham advanced the idea that taxes should be levied to get Africans to ‘acknowledge’ the state as the supreme authority. Tellingly, the French anthropologist Michel Leiris noted that obtaining taxes was in fact colonialism’s ‘chief preoccupation’ (quoted in W. H. Worger, N. L. Clark and E. A. Alpers, Africa and the West: a documentary history. Volume 2 (Oxford University Press, 2010)). The final chapter’s focus on ‘new organisational systems, collaboration among government agencies, and the effective socialising and disciplining of staff’ in African public administrations to get better at taxes unintentionally echoes these types of efforts. Given that the first two decades of the twenty-first century have been defined by gross disparities within African countries and between Africa and the rest of the world, taxes remain one of the most revolutionary tools for building fairer countries. This text is a useful starting point for understanding how to rebuild the current system, even if it unexpectedly raises unanswered questions about the ‘real politics’ of taxation, multinational tax avoidance and state formation on the continent.