The African Palm Swift is a slender swift with a deeply forked tail that clings beneath palm fronds.
It has a slender gray-brown body and a deeply forked tail.
It clings to the undersides of palm fronds with tiny claws, where it nests and roosts.
In southern Africa, both sexes build a shallow cup of feathers and plant fragments bound with saliva.
In southern Africa it lays one or two eggs, which the female fixes to the nest with saliva. Both sexes incubate for 18–22 days.
Both sexes brood and feed the chicks.
It catches beetles, flies, termites and ants mainly above the canopy, sometimes feeding in mixed flocks with other swifts and swallows.
Short calls typically contain two to six downslurred elements. Birds in loose flocks give longer series and staccato notes.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.