The African red-rumped swallow (Cecropis melanocrissus) is small passerine bird in the swallow family Hirundinidae. It is found in northern areas of Africa south of the Sahara.
The African red-rumped swallow was formally described and illustrated in 1845 by the German naturalist Eduard Rüppell based on a specimen collected in the Tembien region of northern Ethiopia. He coined the binomial name Cecropis melanocrissus where the specific epithet combines the Latin melas, melanos meaning "black" with Modern Latin crissum meaning "vent".
Four subspecies are recognised:
C. m. domicella (Heuglin, 1869) – west Africa from Senegambia to east Sudan
C. m. melanocrissus Rüppell, 1845 – Ethiopia and Eritrea
C. m. kumboensis (Bannerman, 1923) – Sierra Leone and west Cameroon
C. m. emini (Reichenow, 1892) – southeast Sudan, Uganda and Kenya to Malawi and north Zambia
The subspecies domicella was formerly treated as a separate species, the West African swallow. The subspecies melanocrissus, kumboensis and emini were formerly placed in the red-rumped swallow complex. The taxa were re-arranged based mainly on differences in morphology. As part of the rearrangement the red-rumped swallow complex was split into the European red-rumped swallow and the eastern red-rumped swallow.
