The anatomy of the secondary phloem of Strephonema pseudocola A, Chev. has been compared with that of some other representatives of the Combretaceae originating from the Ivory Coast, Africa, This is done because there exist different opinions about the systematic position of the genus. Also the anatomical wood properties of the species concerned were investigated and the results compared with those found by others. Although Strephonema pseudocola differs fundamentally from the rest of the family, the anatomy of the secondary phloem, may be more so than that of the secondary xylem, leads us to retain the genus in the Combretaceae, but as a distinctly separate subfamily. By its bark and anatomical wood characters, the genus has some claim to be an ancestral type in the Combretaceae.