Description:

• Trees or shrubs, with spreading branches often ending in spines, usually with a light yellowish or greyish bark
• Leaves fascicled, alternate or irregularly spaced, simple, entire, coriaceous, petiolate
• Inflorescence terminal or axillary, pedunculate or sessile racemes, panicles or corymbs, sometimes flowers fascicled; bracts setaceous or linear, entire, trifid, often caducous
• Sepals 4, fleshy, scarcely fused at base with fleshy corona, valvate, yellowish green
• Petals usually 0, rarely 1-4, spathulate
• Stamens 5-22, hardly fused in an androphore
• Ovary on a gynophore up to 8 mm long, ovoid, 1-locular, with (2)4-8 ovules on two parietal placentas
• Fruit a berry with clusters of stone cells in exocarp
• Seeds usually 1 or 2, usually with a pustulate or colliculate surface

Nomenclature:

• Boscia Lam.
  • Lamarck: t. 395 (1793) name conserved
  • Sonder: 60 (1860) in part
  • Gilg & Gilg-Benedict: 203 (1915)
  • Pax & Hoffmann: 188 (1936)
  • Phillips: 356 (1951)
  • Wild: 229 (1960)
  • Elffers et al.: 50 (1964)
  • Roessler: 2 (1966)
  • Tölken: 59 (1969)
  • Tölken: 150 (1970)
  • Fici: 44 (1993)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 37, throughout Africa and 1 species in Arabian Peninsula
• Southern Africa: Species 9, widespread