Africa has a diverse ecology that ranges from desert, montane, tropical dry to tropical humid. These ecologies abound in diverse indigenous fruits and nuts, which if adequately utilized, could address issues of food and nutritional security, conservation of biodiversity, eco-tourism, job creation and foreign exchange earnings, all culminating in improved livelihoods. Nonetheless, their potentials remain underutilized as these commodities are often hardly known beyond their respective sub-regions of origin/diversity. In spite of the copious literature on the ethnobotany of African fruits and nuts, many of them are still gathered from the wild, consumed locally and their availability is subject to a lot of vagaries. Crops that are gathered from the wild are endangered because they are often depleted during land clearing for commercial cultivation or urbanization projects. However, a few have been selected, domesticated, and feature at low populations in the cropping systems and are traded locally and sometimes nationally (Aiyelaagbe, 1992).
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