Description:

• Medium to large trees of varying habit, usually with a rounded crown; branches often stout, spreading
• Leaves imparipinnate, opposite or ternate, petiolate; leaflets large, elliptic; foliar morphology very variable
• Flowers large, pedicellate, in pendulous, long-peduncled, lax panicles; pollinated by bats
• Calyx 2-5-lobed, leathery; tube campanulate to almost tubular, 5-ribbed; lobes sometimes apiculate
• Corolla: tube slightly curved, cylindrical below, widely campanulate above, leathery, glabrous; limb bilabiate; upper lip short, erect; lower lip longer, deflexed; lobes 5, ± obovate; yellowish at first, then reddish to purplish
• Stamens 4, didynamous, arising at top of the cylindrical part of corolla tube, subexserted; filaments thick, linear, leathery, pilose at base; anther thecae separating and sometimes with an apical, fleshy, bilobed appendage; staminode 1
• Nectary annular, thick, 5-lobed, leathery, tomentose
• Ovary terete, unilocular; placentas 2, parietal and much intruded; ovules many in many rows; style subterete, subexserted; stigma of two elliptic lobes
• Fruit large, sausage-shaped, pendulous, hard-walled, indehiscent; pulp fibrous
• Seeds many, thick, wingless, with coriaceous testa intruded between cotyledons
• x = 10 (21) (aneuploids)

Nomenclature:

• Kigelia DC.
  • Candolle: 135 (1838)
  • Sprague: 454 (1904)
  • Sprague: 533 (1906)
  • Phillips: t. 573 (1935) as K. pinnata
  • Merxmüller & Schreiber: 2 (1967)
  • Palgrave: 833 (1977)
  • Diniz: 83 (1988)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Monotypic: Kigelia africana (Lam.) Benth., tropical and southern Africa
• Southern Africa: Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, from ± Messina (Northern Province), through lowveld (Mpumalanga) to KwaZulu-Natal, possibly as far south as Durban; also in Swaziland