STRYCHNOS SPINOSA
STRYCHNOS SPINOSA
STRYCHNOS SPINOSA
French: Orange des singes
Wolof: Tembou
Strychnos Spinosa is a small, thorny tree in the Loganiaceae family. It is a tree with opposite leaves, oval, pointed at their end, with white flowers in a corymb. It produces green fruits then orange-yellow when ripe, known as monkey oranges (in English monkey orange) or Natal oranges (Natal orange). These fruits have a very hard shell (exocarp), they contain in the middle of an edible pulp many dark brown flat seeds which contain strychnine and other alkaloids.
The greenish-white flowers grow in dense land at the tips of the branches
Fruits tend to appear only after good rains.
The interior of the fruit is filled with tight seeds surrounded by a fleshy, edible covering.
The leaves are a source of food for duikers, kudus, impalas, and elephants.
This tree is found increasingly isolated in well-drained soils.
It is found in the forests and sandy scrublands of the coastline of the Eastern Cape Province, Kwazulu-Natal, Mozambique, and through Swaziland, Zimbabwe, northern Botswana, and northern Namibia, north from tropical Africa.
In East Africa different resources are obtained from this plant:
the young leaves are boiled and eaten with shea butter among the gourounsi of central western Burkina Faso.
The pulp can be dried and stored. The bark and the roots are used in traditional medicine against stomach ache.
Ripe, open fruit is used by hunters as bait to attract bush pigs.
It provides a wood that is used for general carpentry and carving. The fruit can be used as an additional source of food by rural people in times of scarcity.
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