The absence of a phylogenetic hypothesis in the genus Androcymbium has prevented the examination of at least two major evolutionary topics. One of them has to do with the origin and dynamics of the geographical disjunction between North and South Africa. The other concerns the identification of the continental relatives of the two species from the Canary Islands. We generated a cpDNA phylogeny through the examination of restriction site variation for 21 endonucleases in 53 populations of the genus. Our sampling includes all known stands of the six species in North Africa and the Canary Islands, plus a thorough populational representation of the taxa in the Atlantic fringe and the Western mainland of Southern Africa. A total of 857 mutations were detected, 567 of which were phylogenetically informative. Our analyses strongly support a South African origin of the genus with A. eucomoides from the Mediterranean region of the Cape province sister to the monophyletic North African group. The close relationship between the North African A. wyssianum and the two Canarian species A. psammophilum and A. hierrense is in agreement with previous allozymic evidence. South African taxa occur in three well-supported paraphyletic groups with different rates of cpDNA evolution both within and between them. This raises the issue of how the substantial ecobiological differences among the two main geographical zones of distribution might have affected the evolutionary dynamics of the genus.

Key words: Africa, Androcymbium, Biogeography, Colchicaceae, Phylogeny, RFLPs