Photo: Photographs: Ettore Balocchi (upper left), Bjørn Christian Tørrissen (upper right), Marco Schmidt (bottom left), Genet (bottom right). Montage by RoRo, CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)
Sausage Tree
Kigelia africana
Also known as Sausage Tree, Cucumber Tree, Kigelia, Sausage Vine (regional)
Key benefits
✦Traditional uses
✦Across much of tropical Africa, the sausage tree has long held a place of real importance, its enormous fruit gathered, sliced, and dried for use in traditional skin preparations passed down through generations of healers. The fruit's pulp has traditionally been applied, after careful preparation, to help soothe and tend to the skin, and the bark has found its own place in traditional wound and digestive folk remedies. Beyond the body, the tree itself carries deep cultural weight, planted near homesteads as a marker of protection and often woven into rainmaking and fertility rites across many communities. Today its extract has traveled far from the savanna, turning up in skin-firming creams and cosmetic formulations sold around the world.
How to grow & use it
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- ✦Shea butter
- ✦Aloe vera
- ✦Marula oil
- ✦Calendula
- ✦Aloe vera
“For the wild, weighty fruit of the savanna, wrapped in centuries of skin lore and standing watch over the riverbank.”
The tree's fruit can grow over two feet long and weigh more than ten pounds, dangling from thin stalks like lanterns, which is exactly how it earned its sausage-shop nickname from early European travelers in Africa.
Raw sausage tree fruit is purgative and can irritate or blister skin, so it's only used after drying and roasting, never raw or as a food. Avoid it in pregnancy, breastfeeding, and in children, and keep clear of the ground beneath the tree since the heavy fruit can fall without warning.