A shrubby legume of tropical Africa, in a genus best known for rotenoid compounds that stun fish without making them unsafe to eat. Tephrosia bracteolata itself is recorded as a cultivated fish-poison plant on the Ivory Coast.
Tephrosia bracteolata (family Fabaceae) is an upright, branched herb, annual from a short taproot or sometimes perennial, usually 0.5 to 1 metre tall but up to 3 metres in wetter climates. Its stems are covered in fairly stiff hairs, and its leaves are pinnate, with ten to fifteen pairs of narrow leaflets that are silvery-grey beneath. It usually flowers in the rainy season.
It grows from Senegal and Ethiopia south to Lower Congo, Uganda and northern Tanzania, and on the Cape Verde Islands, at 540 to 1,700 metres. It is found in grassland and woodland, chiefly in seasonally swampy places, on sands and poor stony ground, on the banks of ditches and floodplains and in grassy savanna along roads, and it is sometimes abundant in the first year of a fallow. Like several of its relatives it is a fish poison, and in Côte d'Ivoire it has been cultivated for that purpose. Its leaves and roots are used to make amulets carried by hunters and warriors for protection against wild animals and weapons. Sources disagree about its value as fodder: some say horses and sheep graze it, others that it is unpalatable and very seldom eaten.
Sources: PROTA4U database (Plant Resources of Tropical Africa), which compiles records from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Conservatoire et Jardin botaniques de Genève, FAO EcoCrop and other botanical databases.
Related Tephrosia species are studied for insecticidal and antiparasitic compounds; no source specific to this species' medicinal use was found.
A tropical African shrub; where used for fishing, the leaves are crushed and released into still water.