Pappea capensis has tasty fruit. Its bark is pound into powder and prepared with soap to treat constipation. The leaves are palatable for goats, camels and cattle.
Plants trees to 12 m tall; bark rough, dark grey to blackish; branchlets tomentallous, hairs yellowish. Leaves petiolate; petioles 4-22 mmm long; blades simple, ellpitic or oblong, 3-14 cm long, 1.5-7 cm wide, puberulent to tomentellous, bases truncate to cordate, margins entire to crenate, serrate, or wavy, tips rounded to shallowly emarginate. Inflorescences 2-15(-20) cm long, tometellous.
I. Friis and K. Vollesen 2: 252-253
Plants to 12 m tall; bark rough, dark grey to blackish; branchlets tomentellous, yellowish. Leaves simple, puberulent to tomentellous; petioles 4-22 mm long; blades 3-14 cm long, 1.-7 cm wide, elliptic or oblong, bases truncate to subcordate, margins entire to crenate or serrate, wavy, tips rounded to shallowly emarginate. Inflorescences 2-15(-20) cm long, tomentellous; pedicels 0.5-3 mm long; sepals 1-1.5 mm long, united to above the middle, lobes broadly triangular; petals about 1 mm long, white to yellowish green, boradly ovate to subcircular; filaments about 3 mm long, glabrous; ovaries 1-1.5 mm lon; styles about 2 mm long. Fruits about 1 mm in diameter, subglobose, 1(-2)-lobed, yellowish; seeds about 7 mm in diameter, black with red arillode.
Pappea capensis grows in woodland, evergreen bushland and forest at 850-2000 m. It is known from regions N1-3 of the Flora of Somalia and from Eritrea, Ethiopia through east Africa to the Cape Province of South Africa and and across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen and Oman.
