The greater striped swallow was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected in the Cape of Good Hope district of South Africa.

[1] The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text.

[2] Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Hirundo cucullata in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.

[3] The greater striped swallow is now one of nine species that are placed in the genus Cecropis that was introduced by the German zoologist Friedrich Boie in 1826.

The greater striped swallow is common, unafraid of humans, and has benefited from the availability of nest sites around habitation.

The greater striped swallow builds a bowl-shaped mud nest with a tubular entrance on the underside of a suitable structure.