Apartheid Trivia
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66 free Apartheid trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This apartheid trivia quiz covers South Africa's system of legalised racial segregation from the National Party's 1948 victory to the first free election on 27 April 1994. It starts with the machinery of the state: the Population Registration Act and the pencil test, the Group Areas Act and forced removals from Sophiatown and District Six, the dompas, Bantu Education, and the ten homelands the government tried to turn into foreign countries. It then follows the resistance and the reckoning: the Defiance Campaign and the Freedom Charter, Sharpeville, the Rivonia Trial, the Soweto uprising, Steve Biko, sanctions and sporting boycotts, protest songs from Britain and America, F.W. de Klerk's February 1990 speech, Mandela's walk out of Victor Verster, CODESA, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Roughly a third of the questions suit a school history class; the rest will test anyone who has read Long Walk to Freedom. Our South Africa and Nelson Mandela quizzes cover the wider country and the man. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on apartheid, its laws, its people and its events, and each explanation adds one more detail.
30 of 66 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Communist Party leader's 1993 assassination pushed negotiators to agree a date for South Africa's first democratic election?
Chris Hani
Chris Hani's killer was quickly caught because an Afrikaner woman who saw him called the police.
Q 02Which South African prime minister lost power in the 1948 election that began apartheid?
Jan Smuts
Jan Smuts had written the first draft of the UN Charter's preamble three years before he lost to the apartheid campaign.
Q 03Which 1949 law was among the first pieces of apartheid legislation?
Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act
The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act was followed in 1950 by the Immorality Amendment Act, which banned sex across the colour line too.
Q 04Apartheid officials sometimes classified race by pushing which object into a person's hair and telling them to shake?
A pencil
A pencil that stayed put in the hair marked a person for the lower classification, such as Black rather than Coloured.
Q 05Which 1950 law carved cities into zones where only one race could own property or live?
Group Areas Act
The Group Areas Act was used to force many people of colour out of neighbourhoods declared white.
Q 06What is the title of Trevor Noah's memoir about his childhood under apartheid?
Born a Crime
Born a Crime: his parents' relationship was illegal when he was born in 1984, and it was decriminalised only a year later.
Q 07Which chief minister of the KwaZulu homeland founded the Inkatha movement in 1975?
Mangosuthu Buthelezi
Mangosuthu Buthelezi called for a boycott of the 1994 election, then brought his party into the vote just days before polling.
Q 08Which homeland was the first that South Africa declared 'independent'?
Transkei
Transkei's first leader, Kaiser Matanzima, was related to Nelson Mandela but split with him over working with the apartheid government.
Q 09Johannesburg's Soweto takes its name from an abbreviation of what?
South Western Townships
South Western Townships became Soweto after the city council ran a competition for a collective name, adopting it in 1963.
Q 10Which Johannesburg suburb was demolished from 1955, its black residents moved to Meadowlands in Soweto?
Sophiatown
Sophiatown's removals began on 9 February 1955, when 2,000 police armed with rifles moved out the first families.
Q 11Which Cape Town neighbourhood did the government declare whites-only in 1966, then demolish?
District Six
District Six's homes were bulldozed and its people scattered to townships, while much of the cleared land stayed empty for decades.
Q 12What nickname did black South Africans give the passbook they had to carry at all times in white areas?
Dompas
Dompas checks meant anyone caught without one could be arrested and jailed, and the pass laws led to millions of arrests.
Q 13In 1956, women marching on Pretoria against the pass laws sang that touching the women meant striking what?
A rock
A rock, the song said; the marchers also left thousands of petitions at Prime Minister Strijdom's office and stood in silence for 30 minutes.
Q 2121 March, anniversary of the 1960 police shootings of pass-law protesters, is which South African public holiday?
Human Rights Day
Human Rights Day shares 21 March with the UN's International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which commemorates the same shootings.
Q 22Which British prime minister delivered the 'Wind of Change' speech in Cape Town in 1960?
Harold Macmillan
Harold Macmillan told South Africa's Parliament a 'wind of change' was blowing through Africa as colonies sought self-rule, and spoke frankly against apartheid.
Q 23On 31 May 1961, the day it became a republic, South Africa withdrew from which organisation?
The Commonwealth
Q 14Which PAC leader was detained under a clause named after him?
Sobukwe
Sobukwe's three-year sentence ended in 1963, but the clause kept extending his detention, and he was held in solitary confinement on Robben Island until 1969.
Q 15Which schools nearly all closed when the 1953 Bantu Education Act ended their state support?
Mission schools
Mission schools shut almost everywhere, and the state system that replaced them enrolled more children but in badly overcrowded, ill-equipped schools.
Q 16Which post did Hendrik Verwoerd hold from 1950 while crafting the laws that made him 'Architect of Apartheid'?
Minister of native affairs
As minister of native affairs, Verwoerd also took charge of African education, shaping it to prepare black pupils for labouring jobs rather than higher study.
Q 17In which country was Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime minister assassinated in 1966, born?
The Netherlands
The Netherlands was his birthplace in 1901, and his father moved the family to South Africa in 1903 out of sympathy for the Boers after their war with Britain.
Q 18Who fatally stabbed Hendrik Verwoerd during a sitting of South Africa's House of Assembly in September 1966?
A parliamentary messenger
A parliamentary messenger, Dimitri Tsafendas, was ruled insane and detained indefinitely, and he died still in detention in 1999.
Q 19In 1996, South Africa's national football team hosted and won which tournament?
The Africa Cup of Nations
The Africa Cup of Nations was won by a racially mixed South African side, after decades in which the country's football had been split by race.
Q 20On 21 March 1960, police opened fire on pass-law protesters in which township, killing 69 people?
Sharpeville
Sharpeville's crowd had answered the Pan-Africanist Congress's call to leave passbooks at home and offer themselves for arrest.
South Africa was readmitted to The Commonwealth in 1994, after its first multiracial election, 33 years after leaving.
Q 24Where was the Freedom Charter adopted at the 1955 Congress of the People?
Kliptown
Police broke up the Kliptown gathering, and more than 150 activists were later charged with treason.
Q 25The Black Sash, formed in 1955, was an anti-apartheid organisation made up of whom?
White women
White women in the Black Sash wore black sashes at vigils, first protesting the government's plan to strip Coloured voters from the common roll.
Q 26Nelson Mandela co-founded which armed wing of the ANC in 1961?
Umkhonto we Sizwe
Umkhonto we Sizwe launched its sabotage campaign on 16 December 1961, striking at the apartheid government's installations.
Q 27The Rivonia Trial followed a 1963 police raid on which Johannesburg-area property?
Liliesleaf Farm
Papers seized at Liliesleaf Farm incriminated Mandela, already serving a prison term, so he was put on trial with the others.
Q 28What sentence did Judge Quartus de Wet give Mandela at the end of the Rivonia Trial in 1964?
Life imprisonment
Life imprisonment spared Mandela the death sentence his own lawyers had feared.
Q 29Mandela's prisoner number, 466/64, later named his global campaign against what?
HIV/AIDS
HIV/AIDS was the target: Mandela turned his old prison number into the name of a campaign and concerts raising money and awareness.
Q 30Robben Island takes its name from the Dutch word for which animal?
Seal
Seal Island is what Robben Island means, and the Dutch were already sending political prisoners there in the 17th century.