Benin Trivia
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46 free Benin trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Benin is a thin slice of West Africa between Togo and Nigeria that most quiz-takers would struggle to place, yet its history is enormous. This was Dahomey, the "Black Sparta" whose all-female army inspired The Woman King, and Ouidah, one of the busiest slave ports on the whole Atlantic coast. It is the homeland of Vodun (voodoo), a lake village of 20,000 people on stilts, and the country whose president was the first on mainland Africa to lose power at the ballot box. This quiz covers geography (why does the country have a capital and a separate seat of government?), history (Dahomey's kings, the French conquest, the Marxist years, the 1990 return to democracy), symbols and culture (the flag, Vodun Day, Zangbeto night guardians, Angélique Kidjo), wildlife (elephants and cheetahs in Pendjari) and daily life (zemidjan motorbike taxis, corn dough and peanut sauce). Questions range from easy to expert. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and other reference pages before publishing.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the official capital of Benin?
Porto-Novo
Porto-Novo keeps the title and the national legislature, but the presidency, most ministries and the embassies sit in a larger port city just along the coast.
Q 02Which city is Benin's chief port and seat of government, though not its official capital?
Cotonou
Cotonou is the de facto administrative capital, home to the president and most ministers, while the official capital keeps little more than the legislature.
Q 03Which two countries border Benin to the west and east?
Togo and Nigeria
Togo and Nigeria squeeze Benin into a narrow wedge: its coast is only about 120 km wide, yet the country runs some 675 km inland to the Niger River.
Q 04What does Benin's 1 August national holiday mark?
Independence
Independence from France came on 1 August 1960, but not for a country called Benin: the new state was Dahomey, and kept that name for its first 15 years.
Q 05The kingdom behind the names Bight of Benin and Benin Bronzes belonged to which people?
The Edo
The Edo kingdom of Benin lay around Benin City, well to the east of the modern republic, which borrowed the bay's name only in 1975.
Q 06The Kingdom of Dahomey's all-female army unit was nicknamed what by European observers?
Amazons
Amazons was the Europeans' borrowing from the women warriors of Greek myth. In Dahomey they were the Agojie or Mino, 'our mothers'.
Q 07What nickname did Dahomey's military obsession earn it from explorers such as Richard Burton?
Black Sparta
Black Sparta summed up a kingdom organised for war, where boys were apprenticed to soldiers as shield-bearers until they were old enough to fight.
Q 08Which Hollywood film dramatised the Agojie, the elite warriors of Dahomey?
The Woman King
The Woman King casts Viola Davis as an Agojie general and was shot in South Africa. Marvel had already borrowed the same warriors as the model for Black Panther's Dora Milaje.
Q 09Which king of Dahomey seized the throne in 1818 with a Brazilian slave trader's help and ended tribute to Oyo?
Ghezo
Ghezo rewarded the trader, Francisco Félix de Sousa, by naming him 'Chacha' of Ouidah, the kingdom's chief trade official in the port.
Q 10Béhanzin, last independent king of Dahomey, was exiled by the French to which Caribbean island?
Martinique
Martinique was his prison after the French defeated him in 1894. He was later moved to Algeria, where he died in 1906, and only after his death were his remains brought home.
Q 11Which animals live in, and give their name to, a famous Vodun temple in Ouidah?
Pythons
Pythons are kept there because the temple is the centre of the worship of Dangbé, the serpent deity.
Q 12The Door of No Return in Ouidah is a memorial arch to what?
Enslaved Africans shipped overseas
Enslaved Africans shipped overseas left from this beach. Ouidah was still at it in 1860, sending the last recorded slave shipment to the United States half a century after that country banned the trade.
Q 13Vodun was carried from the Benin coast to which Caribbean country, where it became Vodou?
Haiti
Q 21Which crop is Benin's leading export and the backbone of its farm economy?
Cotton
Cotton is the mainstay, and it made at least one fortune: the businessman elected president in 2016 was known as the 'king of cotton'.
Q 22The earthen palaces of the kings of Dahomey, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, stand in which town?
Abomey
Abomey's royal quarter grew as twelve kings, between 1625 and 1900, each added a palace inside the same earthen walls. Only one of them, Akaba, built his outside.
Q 23The WAP complex, including Benin's Pendjari National Park, holds West Africa's largest population of which animal?
Elephants
Elephants number more than 3,800 across the W-Arly-Pendjari parks, which also shelter some of the last lions in West Africa, so the complex is the region's key refuge for big game.
Haiti's Vodou grew in large part from beliefs brought over from this coast, as did Louisiana Voodoo. Benin itself marks 10 January as National Vodun Day.
Q 14Ganvie, a village of some 20,000 people on Lake Nokoué, is built how?
On stilts over the water
On stilts over the water, with bamboo houses rising from the shallow lake and wooden boats the only way in or out, which is why visitors call it the Venice of Africa.
Q 15Ganvie's founders, the Tofinu, built their village out on a lake to escape whom?
Slave raiders
Slave raiders from the kingdom of Dahomey were seizing people to sell to European traders, so in the 16th or 17th century the Tofinu made the lake their refuge and became known as the 'water men'.
Q 16Benin's Grammy-winning singer Angélique Kidjo became a goodwill ambassador for which UN agency in 2002?
UNICEF
UNICEF made her an ambassador in 2002, and four years later she went further, founding the Batonga Foundation to support the education of girls in Benin and across Africa.
Q 17Benin's flag has yellow and red horizontal bands beside a vertical band of which colour at the hoist?
Green
Green fills the hoist of the flag adopted in 1959. The Marxist government scrapped the design in 1975, and it came back in 1990 when that regime fell.
Q 18Which emblem did Benin's flag carry under Marxist rule from 1975 to 1990?
A red star
A red star, for unity and revolution, sat in the upper corner of a plain field whose colour stood for farming. The ruling party's own flag simply swapped the two colours round.
Q 19Which first for mainland Africa did Benin's 1991 presidential election produce?
A sitting president was voted out
A sitting president was voted out: Mathieu Kérékou, the former Marxist military ruler, accepted defeat by Nicéphore Soglo in a popular election, then won the office back at the ballot box five years later.
Q 20In 1999, President Kérékou made a national apology for what?
Africans' role in the Atlantic slave trade
Africans' role in the Atlantic slave trade was the subject of his apology, made on a visit to Baltimore. Benin has since passed a law offering citizenship to descendants of the enslaved.
Q 24Benin's W National Park is named after what?
A W-shaped river meander
A W-shaped river meander: the Niger doubles back on itself at the park's northern edge. Benin handed its share of the park, over 8,000 square kilometres, to the conservation group African Parks in 2020.
Q 25Which dry wind blows off the Sahara across Benin from December to March?
The harmattan
The harmattan dries the grass, turns the vegetation reddish-brown and hangs a veil of fine dust over the country, hazing the sky for weeks at a time.
Q 26Which people of the Atakora Mountains build two-storey fortified mud houses called tata?
The Somba
The Somba, also called the Batammariba, live above their animals: stores and small livestock fill the ground floor, with sleeping rooms and a granary on the roof terrace. Their homeland is a World Heritage Site.
Q 27In Benin's towns and cities, what is a 'zemidjan'?
A motorcycle taxi
A motorcycle taxi: the name means roughly 'take me quickly', and riders wear shirts colour-coded by city, yellow in the chief port.
Q 28What is traditionally believed to be under the whirling costume of Benin's Zangbeto night guardians?
No human, only spirits
No human, only spirits, says the legend, and to suggest that men wear the raffia was once a grave offence. The Zangbeto still patrol after dark as night watchmen, hunting out thieves.
Q 29Which Oscar-nominated Hollywood actor was born in Benin and moved to France as a boy?
Djimon Hounsou
Djimon Hounsou left Benin as a boy and was sleeping rough in France when a chance meeting led to modelling for Thierry Mugler. He went on to Oscar nominations for In America and Blood Diamond.
Q 30What ended Benin's one-party Marxist state in 1990?
A national conference
A national conference met in February 1990, heard Kérékou admit that his policies had failed, and stripped him of most of his powers. The People's Republic became the Republic of Benin that year.