After many years of neglect, the interdisciplinary scholarship on motor transportation in Africa seems to be booming. Matteo Rizzo's text is one of the latest in a series of releases over the last two years, which looks at the practice of African workers in the motor transport sector. Rizzo uses the complex labour arrangements of the daladala system in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as a case study in the politics of labour mobilisation and class formation within the extensive informal economy of cities across the African continent.

As Rizzo notes, throughout the 1970s, private vehicle owners operated unregulated and technically illicit services in the interstices of the government-owned UDA (Shirika la Usafiri Dar es Salaam). When transport services were officially opened to private competition in 1983, African vehicle owners quickly took advantage of the opportunity. The number of daladala in operation expanded quickly – from 178 in 1983 to 355 in 1991 (33). The general public and government officials alike have been quick to condemn the ubiquitous, risky practices employed by daladala drivers as a threat to public safety at multiple levels. Rizzo argues that risky behaviours are rooted not only in a failure of government regulation, but also in the realities of narrow profit margins and limited job prospects among workers within the daladala system.

Throughout seven concise chapters, Rizzo explores the labour relations that structure the daladala system, as well as ongoing efforts to mobilise that diverse labour force into a more coherent class movement that could agitate for better structural and employment conditions. At the core of this analysis is an argument about the way that academics and policymakers have defined the ‘informal economy’. By tracing labour relations within the daladala system, Rizzo demonstrates quite clearly that the dominant narrative of the ‘entrepreneurial’ informal sector obscures a complex labour system, with overlapping systems of wage labour, paid labour and entrepreneurialism. As he argues, local efforts to organise daladala workers in a way that acknowledges this complexity have achieved some success, even if union leaders were unable to sustain these associations over the long term. These examples suggest that labour mobilisation and class formation might be possible within the daladala system. However, Rizzo's final chapter on the adoption of a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system in Dar es Salaam suggests that the structural conditions that undermine the market power of these workers do not seem to be changing any time soon.

In detailing the complex relationships that structure this vibrant sector of the ‘informal economy’, Rizzo brings important nuance to academic and policy discussions about just what/who the ‘informal economy’ is. There is a vibrant anthropological literature on the informal economy, which Rizzo often oversimplifies or caricatures in an effort to make his larger point. Gracia Clark, for example, did this sort of detailed and differentiated labour study among market women in Ghana two decades ago. Rizzo's own analysis of the perspectives and values of daladala workers and passengers would be strengthened by broader reading in this rich anthropological and historical literature on African urban economies. As it is, Rizzo's commitment to Marxist frameworks sometimes seems to be driving the analysis more than the ethnographic research that he describes in the introduction. Regardless, however, Rizzo's point is an important reminder as scholars and policymakers once again are debating what to do with/about the ‘informal economy’ in light of UN Habitat's Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda.