Chad Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
57 free Chad trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Chad is Africa's fifth-largest country and one of its least visited, a landlocked expanse that runs from the dunes and volcanoes of the Sahara down through the Sahel to green savanna. It is where the oldest known human-line fossil was dug up, where pickup trucks beat Gaddafi's tanks, and where a father-and-son dynasty has held power since 1990. Its flag is almost identical to Romania's, its capital was a French fort, and its shrinking lake gives the country its name. This quiz covers geography (Lake Chad, Emi Koussi and the Tibesti, the Ennedi and its crocodiles, the Bodele dust, the Ounianga lakes), history (Kanem, Wadai, Fort-Lamy, Tombalbaye, Habre and the Toyota War, the Aouzou Strip, Idriss and Mahamat Deby), symbols (the indigo-yellow-red flag, 'La Tchadienne', the CFA franc), culture (Sara and Toubou, millet balls, carcaje tea, Haroun's films) and sport (Les Sao, wrestling in dust). Questions run from easy to expert. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and other reference pages before publishing.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital and largest city of Chad?
N'Djamena
N'Djamena. It was still a small riverside settlement at independence in 1960, and it has been fought over in the civil wars since: Libyan troops occupied it in 1980-81.
Q 02Under what colonial name did the French found Chad's capital?
Fort-Lamy
Fort-Lamy. It was named for a French major killed in the battle across the river that won the region for France, and the name outlasted colonial rule by more than a decade.
Q 03Which explorer hired boatbuilders from Lake Chad to build Ra, the papyrus boat he sailed into the Atlantic?
Thor Heyerdahl
Thor Heyerdahl. Reed boats like those of the pharaohs' Egypt were still being made on Lake Chad, so he hired its builders; Ra broke up short of the Americas in 1969, but a second papyrus boat reached Barbados a year later.
Q 04Which two languages are official in Chad?
French and Arabic
French and Arabic. French is the language of government and schooling, while a local form of Arabic, carried in by migrants from the east, became the language of the markets for around half of all Chadians.
Q 05Chad's vertical tricolour flag is often noted for its similarity to the flag of which European country?
Romania
Romania. The flags differ only in the shade of one stripe, and in 2004, amid reports that Chad had asked the United Nations to step in, Romania's president declared: 'The tricolour belongs to us.'
Q 06Which colour is the central stripe of Chad's vertical tricolour flag?
Yellow
Yellow fills the middle stripe, for the sun and the desert north. The design first proposed in 1959 was green, yellow and red, but green gave way to blue because other new African states had already taken those colours.
Q 07Who was France's president when Chad became independent in 1960?
Charles de Gaulle
Charles de Gaulle had let France's African colonies vote in 1958 on joining a French-led community. Chad voted yes and became a self-governing republic that year, then took full independence two years later.
Q 08Who was Chad's first president, overthrown and killed in 1975?
François Tombalbaye
François Tombalbaye lost even his southern supporters after making yondo, a harsh initiation rite from his own ethnic group, compulsory for civil servants. Soldiers killed him in the 1975 coup.
Q 09Which Chadian dictator, "Africa's Pinochet", was sentenced to life in prison by a tribunal in Senegal in 2016?
Hissène Habré
Hissène Habré fled to Senegal when he was toppled in 1990 and stayed for decades. Survivors of his jails kept pressing until he was arrested there in 2013 and tried by a court created for his case.
Q 10The 1987 final phase of the Chadian-Libyan war is nicknamed after which vehicles used by Chadian troops?
Toyota pickup trucks
Toyota pickup trucks, fast on sand and fitted with anti-tank missiles, carried the Chadian fighters who routed Libya's tank forces in 1987, so the campaign became known as the Toyota War.
Q 11Which court ended Libya's claim to the Aouzou Strip in 1994 by awarding it to Chad?
International Court of Justice
The International Court of Justice found that a 1955 treaty between France and Libya had already fixed the border, so Libya had to pull its troops out of the desert strip it had occupied since 1973.
Q 12Which president ruled Chad for 30 years until killed fighting rebels in April 2021?
Idriss Déby
Idriss Déby had just been projected to win a sixth term when he went to visit troops at the front. He died of wounds suffered there, and a military council led by his son took over.
Q 13Chad's former prime minister Moussa Faki chaired the commission of which organisation for eight years from 2017?
Q 21Which animals fell from about 4,000 to 400 in Chad's Zakouma National Park between 2002 and 2010?
Elephants
Elephants in Zakouma were shot for their ivory by poachers on horseback until nine in ten were gone. The nonprofit African Parks took over protection in 2010, and the herd has been growing again since.
Q 22Which two rivers meet at Chad's capital before flowing into Lake Chad?
The Chari and Logone
The Chari and Logone join at the capital and supply most of the lake's water, yet in the rainy season part of the Logone's flood escapes westward into the Benue river system instead.
Q 23Which US president's administration covertly armed a Chadian rebel leader's bid for power, seeing him as a check on Libya?
Ronald Reagan
The African Union
The African Union elected Moussa Faki to run its commission in 2017. When his first term ended he stood again unopposed and won the backing of 51 of its 55 member states.
Q 14Which jihadist group has raided Chadian villages and army posts around Lake Chad since 2015?
Boko Haram
Boko Haram carried its insurgency across the lake in 2015, striking the Chadian shore and then bombing the capital, and Chad answered by declaring a state of emergency across the lake region.
Q 15Which volcano is the highest point in Chad and in the entire Sahara?
Emi Koussi
Emi Koussi rises about 3,400 metres above sea level, with a vast crater at its summit. Its shape is so like the Martian volcano Elysium Mons that scientists have used it as a stand-in for studying Mars.
Q 16Which mountain range in Chad's far north contains the Sahara's highest peaks?
The Tibesti
The Tibesti and the rest of Chad's desert north stayed under French military administration until 1965, five years after independence, when Chad's own troops finally replaced the French soldiers.
Q 17The Guelta d'Archei, a desert pool where camels drink beside relict crocodiles, lies on which sandstone plateau?
The Ennedi
The Ennedi's crocodiles are survivors from a wetter age when the species lived right across the Sahara, before the drying climate left only a few isolated colonies. UNESCO lists the plateau for its canyons and rock art.
Q 18Which antelope, once declared extinct in the wild, has been bred in captivity and released in Chad since 2016?
Scimitar-horned oryx
The scimitar-horned oryx once crossed Chad in herds of a thousand or more, until hunting and drought finished it off in the wild. Animals bred in captivity have been released into a vast Chadian reserve since 2016.
Q 19What keeps Chad's Lakes of Ounianga full in the middle of the Sahara?
Ancient groundwater
Ancient groundwater, stored beneath the desert since the Sahara was green, seeps up to replace what the sun evaporates, and mats of floating reeds shade the freshwater lakes and slow the loss.
Q 20Dust blown from Chad's Bodélé Depression carries phosphorus that helps fertilise which distant ecosystem?
The Amazon rainforest
The Amazon rainforest depends on phosphorus carried across the Atlantic in Saharan dust. Much of it rises from the Bodélé, a dried-out lake bed made of the remains of tiny organisms that are rich in the nutrient.
Ronald Reagan signed a secret order for CIA support within months of taking office in 1981. The rebel leader captured the capital the following year and ruled as a dictator with American backing until 1990.
Q 24The seven-million-year-old skull nicknamed Toumaï, found in Chad, belongs to which genus?
Sahelanthropus
Sahelanthropus surprised scientists by turning up in Chad, far to the west of the East African Rift Valley where most fossils of early human ancestors are found, so it showed they ranged much more widely than thought.
Q 25Chad's fossil skull Toumaï bears a name desert families give babies born around the dry season, meaning what?
Hope of life
Hope of life was the nickname given in 2002, when its finders presented the skull as the oldest known member of the human family. A Chadian member of the team, Ahounta Djimdoumalbaye, had found it in the desert the year before.
Q 26Which empire, centred northeast of Lake Chad, was the first and longest-lasting of the region's great trading states?
Kanem
Kanem grew rich by controlling the southern end of a caravan route across the Sahara, a trade that dealt above all in slaves. Its ruling dynasty lasted, later from Bornu, into the 1800s.
Q 27Which sultanate east of Lake Chad, with its capital at Abéché, resisted French conquest into the 20th century?
Wadai
Wadai owed its wealth to a caravan route north across the Sahara to the Mediterranean, which traders came to prefer in the 1800s because it was the safest crossing.
Q 28Which Sudanese warlord's army did French forces defeat at the Battle of Kousséri in 1900?
Rabih az-Zubayr
Rabih az-Zubayr, enslaved as a child, rose to lead an army of thousands and conquered the old kingdoms around Lake Chad in the 1890s. His death in this battle opened the region to French rule.
Q 29Which Black governor of Chad rallied the colony to the Free French in 1940?
Félix Éboué
Félix Éboué, born in French Guiana, brought Chad over in August 1940 and soon persuaded the neighbouring colonies to follow. In 1949 he became the first Black person buried in the Panthéon in Paris.
Q 30Which cash crop, introduced on a large scale under French rule, was Chad's main export before oil?
Cotton
Cotton made the south so valuable to France that officials called it 'le Tchad utile', useful Chad, while farmers resented the quotas that forced them to grow it for low fixed prices.