50 Fun Facts About West Africa

Which Mali Empire ruler, often called the richest person ever, made a lavish pilgrimage to Mecca?

Mansa Musa handed out so much gold in Cairo on his way east that he is said to have lowered its value across Egypt. His wealth came from taxing the trade in gold and salt.

Which country, settled by freed Black Americans, later elected Africa's first female president?

Liberia declared independence in 1847, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the economist who became its president, went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

The African Renaissance Monument, a bronze built by a North Korean firm, towers over which capital?

Dakar unveiled the statue in April 2010, for the 50th anniversary of Senegal's independence from France, in front of 19 African heads of state.

Ivory Coast overtook Ghana in 1978 to become the world's leading producer of which crop?

Cocoa brings in about 40% of Ivory Coast's export income, and West Africa as a whole supplies two-thirds of the beans that the world's chocolate makers use.

The Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali, replastered every year, is the world's largest building of what?

Mud brick dried in the sun forms every wall, under a coat of earth that the rains wear away. The whole town turns out for a festival to repair it, and the present mosque dates from 1907.

Which country, the smallest on mainland Africa, is the homeland of Kunta Kinte in the novel Roots?

Gambia is a sliver of land along a single river, bounded by Senegal on every side except its short Atlantic coast.

What nickname is given to Nigeria's film industry, ranked second in the world for output in 2009?

Nollywood took off with the 1992 straight-to-video hit Living in Bondage, and by 2009 UNESCO ranked it behind only Indian cinema for the number of films made.

Which planned city in the centre of Nigeria replaced Lagos as the national capital in 1991?

Abuja was placed in the middle of the country as a sign of neutrality and national unity, following the same logic Brazil used for Brasília.

Which colour gives Lake Retba in Senegal its nickname, thanks to salt-loving algae in the water?

Pink water, tinted by Dunaliella salina algae, earned the lagoon the name Lac Rose. Its salt content reaches 40% in places, and collectors from across the region harvest it by the tonne.

Which capital of Ivory Coast is home to a basilica Guinness lists as the world's largest church?

Yamoussoukro was the birthplace of President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who made it the capital in 1983 and then gave the vast basilica to the Catholic Church.

Freetown, founded in 1792 as a home for freed slaves, is the capital of which country?

Sierra Leone takes its name from the 'lioness mountains' that a Portuguese explorer mapped in 1462. Freetown itself was built by nearly 1,200 Black settlers who sailed from Nova Scotia.

Lomé, whose city limits reach the border with Ghana, is the capital of which country?

Togo began as the German colony of Togoland, and Lomé became its capital in 1897. The frontier lies only a few hundred metres west of the city centre.

Ouagadougou, host of Africa's biggest film festival, FESPACO, is the capital of which country?

Burkina Faso took its present name in 1984 on the initiative of Thomas Sankara; it is usually translated as 'land of the honest men'. FESPACO began as a film week in 1969.

Which country on the Atlantic coast includes the Bijagós, a group of about 88 islands and islets?

Guinea-Bissau added the name of its capital at independence to avoid confusion with its neighbour, the former French Guinea. Only about twenty of the islands are lived on all year.

Praia is the capital of which country, homeland of the 'Barefoot Diva' of morna, Cesária Évora?

Cape Verde is made up of ten volcanic islands about 570 km out in the Atlantic, uninhabited until Portuguese explorers settled them in the 15th century.

Nouakchott, a small fishing village until building began in 1958, is the capital of which country?

Mauritania had no capital city as independence approached, so a new one was laid out on the Atlantic edge of the Sahara, planned for just 15,000 people.

Which city, the capital of Ghana, takes its name from an Akan word for ants?

Accra grew from settlements around three rival European forts, British, Dutch and Danish, and its name recalls the anthills of the nearby countryside.

Which city on the Niger River, made the capital of French Sudan in 1908, is now the capital of Mali?

Bamako boomed after a railway reached it from Kayes in 1904, and it stands near the rapids that divide the upper and middle Niger valleys.

Which city on the Niger River took over from Zinder as the capital of Niger in the 1920s?

Niamey won out because Zinder lay too close to the border with Nigeria and too far from the ports that France controlled.

Which port city, first settled on tiny Tombo Island, is the capital of Guinea?

Conakry later spread along the 36-kilometre Kaloum Peninsula and became the capital of French Guinea in 1904, shipping out groundnuts brought by rail from the interior.

Which city is the official capital of Benin, although the government works from the larger Cotonou?

Porto-Novo is Portuguese for 'New Port', a name left by the Portuguese traders who shipped enslaved people from its harbour in the 18th century. Benin's parliament sits there.

Which lake in Ghana, held back by the Akosombo Dam, is the world's largest reservoir by area?

Lake Volta drowned 15,000 homes in 740 villages as it filled, and 78,000 people had to be resettled. The dam generates a large share of the country's electricity.

Which lake, where Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon meet, shrank dramatically between 1960 and 1990?

Lake Chad lost about nine-tenths of its open water, shrinking from 25,000 square kilometres in the early 1960s as the climate dried and rivers were diverted.

Which dry belt south of the Sahara takes its name from an Arabic word meaning 'coast' or 'shore'?

Sahel is a figurative name for the southern edge of the great desert, and the belt runs 5,900 km across Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.

Which dry, dusty wind blows from the Sahara over West Africa between late November and mid-March?

Harmattan dust can block the sun for days and costs airlines millions in cancelled flights, yet the dry air is such a relief from the humidity that it is nicknamed the doctor wind.

Which island off Senegal, a World Heritage Site since 1978, is home to the House of Slaves museum?

Gorée was among the first twelve places in the world to be listed by UNESCO, though historians dispute how many captives really passed through its 'Door of No Return'.

Which desert-edge city in Mali became a centre of Islamic learning around the Sankoré Madrasah?

Timbuktu grew rich on gold, salt and the caravan routes across the desert, and in its golden age its scholars supported a thriving trade in books.

Which leader took Ghana to independence from Britain in 1957 and became its first prime minister?

Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in February 1966 while on a state visit to China, only weeks after he had opened the giant Akosombo Dam.

By what name was Ghana known under British rule, from 1821 until independence in 1957?

Gold Coast was one of four stretches of shoreline that European traders named after their main exports; its neighbours were known for ivory, slaves and a peppery spice.

Which tree, nicknamed the upside-down tree, appears beside a lion on the coat of arms of Senegal?

Baobab branches are so sparse that they look like roots, which earned the tree its nickname. Its scientific name honours a French botanist who described one in Senegal in 1749.

Which empire, ruled from Gao on the Niger River, collapsed after a Moroccan invasion in 1591?

Songhai fell at the Battle of Tondibi to a force that Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur had sent south across the Sahara. At its peak it was among the largest empires in African history.

The Golden Stool, said to have fallen from the sky, is the sacred throne of which people of Ghana?

Ashanti anger boiled over in 1900 when a British governor demanded to sit on the stool; the war that followed cost them their independence but kept the stool out of his hands.

Which fort in Ghana, built in 1482, is the oldest European building south of the Sahara?

Elmina Castle was put up by the Portuguese as the first trading post on the Gulf of Guinea, then seized in 1637 by the Dutch, under whom its slave trade ran on until 1814.

Which breakaway state, declared by Igbo officer Odumegwu Ojukwu in 1967, fought a war with Nigeria?

Biafra held out for nearly three years under a blockade that starved its people, and television pictures of malnourished children set off a vast international relief airlift.

Which poet, a leading thinker of the Négritude movement, became the first president of Senegal?

Léopold Senghor retired in 1980 and became the first African elected to the Académie française. As a prisoner of war he had learned enough German to read Goethe in the original.

Which regional bloc of West African states was created in 1975 by the Treaty of Lagos?

ECOWAS was set up to knit the region's economies together, but it has also sent joint peacekeeping forces into member countries at least seven times.

Which currency, divided into 100 kobo, replaced the pound in Nigeria in 1973?

Naira is a name the statesman Obafemi Awolowo coined from the country's own, and the switch produced the first coins issued since independence.

Which rice dish fuels a friendly rivalry, dubbed a 'war', between cooks in Nigeria and Ghana?

Jollof takes its name from the Wolof people of Senegal, whose fish-and-rice original, thieboudienne, is now on UNESCO's intangible heritage list.

Which colourful cloth from Ghana is hand-woven in narrow strips of silk and cotton?

Kente weaving is traced by oral tradition to the town of Bonwire, where one story says the first weavers copied the web of a spider.

Which Nigerian pioneer of Afrobeat declared his Kalakuta Republic commune independent of the state?

Fela Kuti paid dearly for mocking the army on his album Zombie: a thousand soldiers stormed the commune in 1977, beat him badly and fatally injured his mother.

Which 1958 debut novel by Chinua Achebe follows Okonkwo, an Igbo leader resisting colonial rule?

Things Fall Apart takes its title from a 1919 poem by W. B. Yeats and has been translated into more than fifty languages.

Which Berber people of the Sahara are nicknamed the Blue People after the indigo veils worn by men?

Tuareg men take up the veil as a rite of passage into manhood, while the women traditionally go unveiled; the dye sometimes rubs off and tints the skin beneath.

Which AC Milan striker won the 1995 Ballon d'Or and was later elected president of his country?

George Weah lost his first run for the presidency of his West African homeland in 2005, served as a senator, then won the 2017 election and was sworn in the following January.

Which Nigerian playwright, jailed for 22 months in the 1960s, won a Nobel Prize in 1986?

Wole Soyinka was branded a traitor for secretly meeting the rebel leader in a bid to head off the civil war, and he went on writing poems and notes in his cell.

What name is given to West Africa's hereditary storytellers, praise singers and oral historians?

Griots hand their craft down the family line and have traditionally married only within their own group; in the Manding languages they are known as jeli.

Which Senegalese star of mbalax music had his biggest worldwide hit in 1994 with the duet 7 Seconds?

Youssou N'Dour sang the trilingual duet with Neneh Cherry, later served as Senegal's minister of tourism, and was once described by Rolling Stone as perhaps the most famous singer alive in much of Africa.

Which language of northern Nigeria and southern Niger has a film industry known as Kannywood?

Hausa is the everyday trade language far beyond its homeland, from northern Ghana to parts of Sudan, so tens of millions of people speak it as a second language.

Which West African instrument has 21 strings stretched over half a gourd covered in cow skin?

Kora strings run in two ranks over a notched bridge, which is why the instrument is classed as a double-bridged harp-lute; in legend its first player bought it from a spirit.

Which people of Mali built their villages along the cliffs of the Bandiagara Escarpment?

Dogon villages cling to the cliff because it was easy to defend, and by tradition the people retreated there rather than convert to Islam.

Which mineral's discovery led to the founding of Arlit, a desert mining town in Niger, in 1969?

Uranium became the country's most valuable export, and the French-run mines around Arlit went on to supply ore for the nuclear power stations of France.