Gabon
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50 free Gabon trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Gabon trivia quiz covers the equatorial oil state on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa: how Portuguese sailors named it after a cloak, the freed slaves who founded Libreville, de Brazza's missions, independence in 1960, four presidents in 65 years including 42 of Omar Bongo, and the 2023 coup that ended his family's rule. It also visits Gabon's astonishing nature, from Loango's surfing hippos and Minkébé's forest elephants to the two-billion-year-old natural nuclear reactor at Oklo, and its people, from Albert Schweitzer to Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. The first questions suit anyone who has heard of the Bongos; the last ones test people who know which railway hauls the manganese and what colour sits between green and blue on the flag. Every question is multiple choice with a short explanation after you answer. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, and each question links to the page that confirms it.
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Q 01What is the capital and largest city of Gabon?
Libreville
Libreville began in 1849 as a village for people freed from a captured slave ship, who held an election and chose a man named Mountier as their mayor.
Q 02Gabon's name is usually traced to a hooded cloak that sailors saw in what?
An estuary
An estuary: Portuguese navigators of the 1470s are said to have seen a gabão, their word for a hooded cloak, in the outline of the Komo river's mouth, and the name later spread to the whole country.
Q 03In its boom years under Omar Bongo, Gabon was said to drink more of what per head than any other country?
Champagne
Champagne: true or not, the story dates from an oil boom that made the president's circle fabulously rich while doing little to lift the rest of Gabon out of poverty.
Q 04Omar Bongo likened a France without its African partners to a car without what?
Fuel
Fuel: France had huge oil interests in Gabon, and the other half of his line was that without France his own side would be a car without a driver.
Q 05Omar Bongo held what distinction after Fidel Castro stepped down in 2008?
World's longest-ruling non-royal leader
World's longest-ruling non-royal leader: in power since 1967, Bongo made Gabon a one-party state and, once rivals were allowed, won every election for the rest of his life.
Q 06The 2023 coup that removed Ali Bongo was led by Brice Oligui Nguema, who is his what?
Cousin
Cousin: Oligui Nguema had been a bodyguard to Ali Bongo's father and commanded the Republican Guard, the elite unit charged with protecting the very government he overthrew.
Q 07Gabon's Mayumba beaches are Africa's busiest nesting ground for which sea turtle?
Leatherback
Leatherback, the largest turtle of all: so many come ashore to lay their eggs that Gabon made the coast a national park in 2002 to protect the nesting beach.
Q 08Which US reality show filmed its 17th season in Gabon in 2008, subtitled 'Earth's Last Eden'?
Survivor
Survivor: the season was won by Bob Crowley, a physics teacher from Maine, who crafted two fake immunity idols to bluff his rivals.
Q 09A famous photograph taken on Gabon's Loango coast shows which animals surfing in the Atlantic?
Hippos
Hippos: Michael Nichols's picture of them in the surf is credited with inspiring President Omar Bongo to create Gabon's national parks, which cover about a tenth of the country.
Q 10The Oklo site in Gabon is known for what unique geological phenomenon?
A natural nuclear reactor
A natural nuclear reactor: about two billion years ago groundwater seeped into rich uranium ore and set off chain reactions that switched on and off for hundreds of thousands of years.
Q 11Rocks near Franceville, Gabon, hold 2.1-billion-year-old shapes that may be the earliest traces of what?
Multicellular life
Multicellular life: if the disc-like shapes, up to 17 cm across, are fossils, they push its origin back by some 1.5 billion years, though critics say minerals alone could have formed them.
Q 12Which Nobel Peace Prize winner founded a hospital at Lambaréné in 1913?
Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer, an Alsatian doctor and concert organist, ran the hospital until he died there in 1965, and spent his Nobel Prize money on a village for leprosy patients.
Q 13In 2023 Gabon was the world's No. 2 producer of which ore, vital for steel and batteries?
Manganese
Q 21Gabon holds more than half the world's population of which animal?
African forest elephant
African forest elephant: a 2021 count put some 95,000 in Gabon, even though poachers had wiped out about four-fifths of the herd in one of its national parks within a decade.
Q 22The freed slaves resettled at the future capital's site in 1849 came from a captured slave ship of which nationality?
Brazilian
Brazilian: Brazil and Cuba were then the main markets for captives shipped from this coast, and the French navy seized the ship, L'Elizia, in 1846 while helping Britain's anti-slavery blockade.
Q 23The Gaboon viper, named after Gabon, has the longest what of any venomous snake?
Fangs
Manganese: before the Trans-Gabon Railway reached the mines at Moanda, the ore left the country the other way, swinging 76 km into Congo on one of the world's longest cableways.
Q 14Gabon lies on which line of latitude?
The Equator
The Equator runs through the middle of Gabon, which is why the country is hot and wet all year and why rainforest covers nearly nine-tenths of it.
Q 15Which of these countries shares a land border with Gabon?
Cameroon
Cameroon lies along Gabon's northern edge; Angola only comes close, because its Cabinda exclave is cut off from Gabon by a strip of the Republic of the Congo.
Q 16Gabon's flag is a horizontal tricolour of green, blue and which colour in the middle?
Yellow
Yellow, for the sun: the band was only a thin stripe on a flag that also carried a small French Tricolour until days before independence in 1960, when the Tricolour was dropped and the yellow widened.
Q 17Gabon joined which international association in June 2022, on the same day as Togo?
Commonwealth of Nations
Commonwealth of Nations: both newcomers were former French colonies with no constitutional link to Britain, and Gabon was partly suspended the following year, after its 2023 coup.
Q 18Who was Gabon's first president, elected in 1961?
Léon M'ba
Léon M'ba spent more than a decade in exile from Gabon before he entered politics, and used it to write what became the standard account of Fang customary law.
Q 19When an army coup toppled Gabon's president in 1964, who restored him to power within days?
French paratroopers
French paratroopers: de Gaulle sent them under a defence agreement signed at independence, and the restored president then shut himself away in his palace under French guard.
Q 20Which explorer led his first mission to the Gabon-Congo area in 1875 and founded Franceville?
Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza
Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, born in Rome, set out with cloth and tools to barter instead of an armed column, and the capital of the neighbouring Congo republic still bears his name.
Fangs: the viper is extremely venomous too, yet it is so placid and slow-moving that it very rarely bites people.
Q 24Gabon's national football team is nicknamed after which animal, the country's national symbol?
Panthers
Panthers: when Gabon hosted the Africa Cup of Nations in 2017, it also chose a black panther, named Samba, as the tournament's mascot.
Q 25Under house arrest after the 2023 coup, Ali Bongo posted a video in English urging his friends to do what?
Make noise
Make noise: 'I don't know what is going on,' he said in the clip, while crowds in the capital were out celebrating the soldiers who had removed him.
Q 26Gabon's national football team is best known for which striker, a former Arsenal captain?
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang was born in France and played once for its under-21 side before choosing Gabon, the country his father had played for; in 2015 he became its first African Footballer of the Year.
Q 27Gabon hosted the 2017 Africa Cup of Nations after civil war cost which country the tournament?
Libya
Libya had already swapped the 2013 tournament with South Africa because of one civil war, then lost the 2017 edition to a second; Gabon, the stand-in host, went out in the group stage.
Q 28Anthony Obame won Gabon's first Olympic medal, a silver at London 2012, in which sport?
Taekwondo
Taekwondo: Obame led the heavyweight final against Italy's Carlo Molfetta until the closing seconds, lost on a judges' decision after a tie, and still came home to thousands of cheering supporters.
Q 29Which lender refused to fund the Trans-Gabon Railway as uneconomic?
World Bank
World Bank: when it turned the scheme down, the 1973 oil boom let Bongo press on with the 648 km 'Bongo Train', saying he would make a pact with the devil if he had to.
Q 30Which monkey roams Gabon's Lopé National Park in hordes of several hundred, possibly the largest groups of any wild primate?
Mandrill
Mandrill: one horde counted at Lopé held 625 animals, mostly females and young, because the big adult males live alone and rejoin the group only for the breeding season.