I'm currently reading King Leopold's Ghost, and in it the author mentioned that the Kongo at the time had a very complex organization but yet did not have writing. I was wondering how was the King able to keep track of whether or not people paid taxes and other administrative aspects without writing. Did they record it some other way that might be similar to writing but not called writing? Wouldn't that just make tax evasion much easier and prevalent?
Before the arrival of the Portuguese, taxation was distributed; authority flowed from the manikongo (King) to local officials, and depended on their ability to collect taxes from the lineage heads running villages under them (who collected it from households under them in turn). This tax was, initially, collected in kind--raffia cloth, slaves, ivory, finished hides or metal goods, and so forth--and whether or not you'd paid the taxes was known to the person above you. Failure to collect enough taxes to enrich the office above you could result in your removal or demotion. All royal officials (with territory, of course) would come before the manikongo once a year, together, to present their offerings, which added a certain competitive element to it.
There was a currency, the nzimbu shell, which was monopolized by the manikongo via the royal fisheries at Luanda, and he would [edit: via this means] distribute back a portion of the taxes as favors via various hierarchies of officials and directly. As the only universal currency, local officials would use this in Mbanzakongo (the capital) or elsewhere to purchase luxuries and signs of prosperity in office. The lack of writing meant that close control of fiscal policy was hard, so the currency was prone to inflation especially once seaborne visitors arrived.
In effect, control depended strongly on maintaining those bonds of clientage all the way down. The King didn't have to keep track of people's tax payments--because the basic political unit, the village, and the networks of officials above them appointed by the court, distributed the accountability and made it manageable at each level. It certainly was arbitrary in terms of levy, and there were no mental actuarial tables. It wasn't feudal (whatever that means anymore) but it had strong elements of that pyramidal system whereby each person knew who had and had not tendered, and the passage of favors up and down the line was an important means of controlling it. The royal household also used a lot of slave labor (entire towns in fact) to produce goods and derived a great deal of its power that way, but in times of a weak leader the decentralized nature of this was quite evident--and as the Portuguese would discover, it could be exploited to create or enhance division within the kingdom.
Most of this comes from the same source Hochschild uses: Vansina's Kingdoms of the Savanna (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 37-45. For later periods, some of this changes--the rise of literate elite culture and external trade shifts the standards of measure but the system as a whole retains much of this tension laden distributed-yet-centralized character.