East Africa
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free East Africa trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
East Africa packs an unusual amount into one corner of a continent. The Great Rift Valley cuts through it, leaving deep lakes, soda flats and snow-capped volcanoes close to the equator. Its savannas stage some of the largest wildlife spectacles on Earth, and its fossil beds have reshaped what we know about human origins. This quiz covers the region the way a good atlas does: the countries of the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes, their capitals and port cities, the peoples and languages, and the trade, kingdoms and colonial rule that shaped the borders on the map. Human geography gets its share, from how people travel and pay to what they grow and eat. The opening questions are the famous landmarks, and later ones reward anyone who has studied the map closely. It suits a geography class, a pub quiz round or a traveller planning a first safari. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something, and the questions can be printed for use on paper.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which mountain in Tanzania is Africa's highest peak and the world's tallest free-standing mountain?
Kilimanjaro
Kilimanjaro rises 5,895 m above sea level, but its famous ice cap lost over 80% of its area in the 20th century and is projected to vanish by the middle of this one.
Q 02Which lake touching Kenya and Tanzania is Africa's largest and the world's largest tropical lake?
Victoria
Lake Victoria is also the world's second-largest freshwater lake by area, behind only Lake Superior. Explorer John Hanning Speke renamed it for the British queen in 1858.
Q 03The word safari, meaning 'journey', entered English in the 1850s from which East African language?
Swahili
Swahili borrowed the word from the Arabic safar, and about 40% of its vocabulary is Arabic loanwords, a legacy of centuries of trade along the coast.
Q 04Which drink comes from an Ethiopian plant that legend says a goatherd saw energize his flock?
Coffee
Coffee's arabica species, the first to be cultivated, is endemic to southwestern Ethiopia. The goatherd tale of Kaldi is probably a myth: it first appears in print in 1671.
Q 05Which Tanzanian archipelago, nicknamed the Spice Islands, was the birthplace of Freddie Mercury?
Zanzibar
Zanzibar also lost the shortest war in recorded history: in 1896 British warships bombarded the sultan's palace, and the fighting was over within 45 minutes.
Q 06Which national park hosts the yearly migration of over a million wildebeest toward Kenya?
Serengeti
Serengeti herds of over 1.5 million wildebeest and 250,000 zebras follow the rains around a loop of about 800 km, the second-longest overland migration on Earth after the caribou's.
Q 07Which Indian Ocean island nation was first settled by seafarers from present-day Indonesia?
Madagascar
Madagascar broke away from the Indian subcontinent about 90 million years ago, and that long isolation left more than 90% of its wildlife found nowhere else on Earth.
Q 08Which cattle-herding people of Kenya and Tanzania are known for the adumu, a warriors' jumping dance?
Maasai
Maasai warriors are judged on the height of their jumps in the adumu, which is thought to have begun as a way to train for combat and show off stamina.
Q 09Which animals, called the Man-Eaters of Tsavo, killed dozens of railway workers in Kenya in 1898?
Lions
Lions hunting as a pair stalked the camp for nine months until project leader John Henry Patterson shot both. After 25 years as his floor rugs, their skins went to Chicago's Field Museum.
Q 10Which primatologist began studying wild chimpanzees at Gombe Stream in Tanzania in 1960?
Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall showed that chimpanzees make and use tools, a skill once thought to set humans apart, and her field research went on for more than six decades.
Q 11Which country protects about half the world's mountain gorillas in its Bwindi Impenetrable National Park?
Uganda
Uganda is one of only three countries where mountain gorillas live wild. Only about a thousand of the apes survive, split between two separate populations.
Q 12Which East African capital, nicknamed the Green City under the Sun, has a national park inside its boundaries?
Nairobi
Nairobi began in the 1890s as a rail depot for a line being built inland from the coast. It is now home to the United Nations Environment Programme.
Q 13Which 3.2-million-year-old fossil skeleton, found in Ethiopia in 1974, was named after a Beatles song?
Lucy
Lucy got her name because Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds played over and over in camp on the night of the find. About 40% of her skeleton was recovered.
Q 21Which city in the centre of Tanzania was chosen in the 1970s to replace Dar es Salaam as national capital?
Dodoma
Dodoma was picked to put the seat of government in the middle of the country, yet Dar es Salaam remains Tanzania's largest city and its commercial capital.
Q 22Which capital city was the scene of the 1993 battle dramatised in Ridley Scott's film Black Hawk Down?
Mogadishu
Mogadishu militiamen shot down American Black Hawk helicopters with rocket-propelled grenades. The battle killed 18 US soldiers and built support in Washington for a withdrawal.
Q 23Which fossil site in northern Tanzania did Mary and Louis Leakey excavate in search of early human ancestors?
Olduvai Gorge
Q 14Which emperor of Ethiopia, overthrown in 1974, is revered as a messiah by followers of Rastafari?
Haile Selassie
Haile Selassie was known before his coronation as Ras Tafari Makonnen, which gave the Rastafari faith its name, yet he himself stayed an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian.
Q 15Which country, nicknamed the land of a thousand hills, suffered a 1994 genocide against the Tutsi?
Rwanda
Rwanda's genocide began within hours of the president's plane being shot down, and it ended that July with a military victory by the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front.
Q 16Which East African country has the longest coastline on the African mainland, at more than 3,300 km?
Somalia
Somalia is also the easternmost country on the African mainland, and its shore faces two bodies of water: the Gulf of Aden to the north and the Indian Ocean to the east.
Q 17Which flightless bird lived only on Mauritius, where Dutch sailors first recorded it in 1598?
The dodo
The dodo was last reliably sighted in 1662, within a lifetime of that first report. Its closest living relative is a pigeon, the Nicobar pigeon.
Q 18Which Kenyan runner covered the marathon distance in under two hours in Vienna in 2019?
Eliud Kipchoge
Eliud Kipchoge ran 1:59:40 behind 41 rotating pacemakers, which is why the time was never ratified as a world record. He also won Olympic marathon gold in 2016 and 2020.
Q 19Which capital city, whose name means 'new flower', hosts the headquarters of the African Union?
Addis Ababa
Addis Ababa sits about 2,355 m above sea level, which makes it the highest capital city in Africa. Emperor Menelik II founded it in the 1880s.
Q 20Which European power did Ethiopia's Emperor Menelik II defeat at the Battle of Adwa in 1896?
Italy
Italy had tried to impose a protectorate through a disputed treaty. Its defeat left Ethiopia the only African country of the era to owe its independence to a military victory.
Olduvai Gorge yielded the jawbone that defined the species Homo habilis in 1960, spotted by the couple's son Jonathan. The species lived there about 1.9 million years ago.
Q 24Which port, Kenya's second-largest city, is guarded by the 16th-century Fort Jesus?
Mombasa
Mombasa's fort was built by the Portuguese in the 1590s and was captured and recaptured at least nine times before the British turned it into a prison in 1895.
Q 25Which uprising of the 1950s pitted mainly Kikuyu fighters against British colonial rule in Kenya?
Mau Mau
Mau Mau forces were broken as a military threat when their field marshal Dedan Kimathi was captured in 1956, but Kenya won its independence only seven years later.
Q 26Which language family, spread by a migration out of West-Central Africa, includes Kikuyu, Luganda and Zulu?
Bantu
Bantu languages number about 600. Their speakers' ancestors began spreading from the Cameroon area thousands of years ago and reached both eastern and southern Africa.
Q 27Which lake, the longest freshwater lake in the world, is second only to Siberia's Baikal in depth?
Tanganyika
Lake Tanganyika is so long and deep that it holds about 16% of the world's available fresh water, and its shores are shared among four countries.
Q 28Which spongy, sour flatbread made from teff flour is served under the stews of an Ethiopian meal?
Injera
Injera is both platter and utensil: stews are placed on top, and diners tear off pieces of the bread to scoop them up. Its grain, teff, originated in Ethiopia.
Q 29Which Kenyan founder of the Green Belt Movement was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize?
Wangari Maathai
Wangari Maathai won the prize in 2004 for a movement built on planting trees. She had earlier become the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate.
Q 30Which European power held mainland Tanzania as a colony until its defeat in the First World War?
Germany
Germany's commander in the colony, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, was never captured and kept his force intact all war, a campaign one historian called history's greatest guerrilla operation.