Ghana
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44 free Ghana trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Ghana trivia quiz covers the first sub-Saharan colony to win independence: the Asante Empire and its Golden Stool, the slave castles of Elmina and Cape Coast, Kwame Nkrumah's Pan-African republic, the coups and Jerry Rawlings, and the peaceful elections of the Fourth Republic. It also takes in what Ghana gives the world, from cocoa and gold to kente and Adinkra, highlife and hiplife, jollof and fufu, Kofi Annan and the Black Stars who came within a handball of a World Cup semi-final. The first questions suit anyone who has seen the black star on the flag; the last ones test people who know why the country is named after an empire hundreds of miles away and where the canopy walkway is. 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.
30 of 44 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital and most populous city of Ghana?
Accra
Accra, on the Atlantic coast, has a metropolitan population of roughly 4 million and became the colonial capital in 1877, when the British moved their administration there from Cape Coast.
Q 02What did Ghana do on 6 March 1957?
Achieve sovereignty
Achieve sovereignty: yet for its first three years Elizabeth II remained its head of state, with a governor-general standing in for her.
Q 03By what name was Ghana known as a British colony?
Gold Coast
Gold Coast: the colony was named for the gold that drew European traders, and at independence it took the name of Ghana, an ancient Sahel empire.
Q 04Who led Ghana to independence and served as its first prime minister and president?
Kwame Nkrumah
Kwame Nkrumah founded the Convention People's Party in 1949 under the slogan 'Self-Government Now', led the country to independence in 1957 and was overthrown by a coup in February 1966.
Q 05Clips of Ghana's dancing pallbearers became a 2020 meme set to which EDM track?
Astronomia
Astronomia: families pay the pallbearers extra to dance, sending loved ones off in style rather than in mourning.
Q 06The black star on Ghana's flag symbolises what?
African emancipation
African emancipation: the star stands for Africa's freedom from colonial rule, and Ghana's football team took its nickname, the Black Stars, from it.
Q 07Which club based in Kumasi is Ghana's most successful, with more than 20 league titles?
Asante Kotoko
Asante Kotoko's 2001 match against Hearts of Oak ended in a deadly stampede after police fired tear gas into the crowd.
Q 08Whose goal-line handball denied Ghana a late winner in the 2010 World Cup quarter-finals?
Luis Suárez
Luis Suárez blocked Dominic Adiyiah's header with his hands and was sent off, but Asamoah Gyan hit the crossbar with the penalty and Uruguay won the shoot-out 4–2.
Q 09What happened to the original Africa Cup of Nations trophy after Ghana's third title in 1978?
They kept it for good
They kept it for good as the first three-time champions, so a new trophy, the African Unity Cup, was introduced from 1980.
Q 10Which farmer is credited with founding Ghana's cocoa industry at Mampong, Akuapem, in 1879?
Tetteh Quarshie
Tetteh Quarshie planted seeds he had brought back from the island of Fernando Po, now Bioko in Equatorial Guinea.
Q 11In 2019, Ghana overtook whom as the continent's top gold producer?
South Africa
South Africa owed its gold boom to the 1886 Witwatersrand gold rush, which led to the founding of Johannesburg.
Q 12Lake Volta, formed by the Akosombo Dam, holds what world record?
Largest reservoir by surface area
Largest reservoir by surface area: filling Lake Volta flooded hundreds of villages and forced nearly 80,000 people to resettle.
Q 13The Asante Golden Stool is said to have fallen from the sky onto the lap of which first king?
Osei Tutu
Osei Tutu is said to have received it through the priest Okomfo Anokye, and the Asante hid it so well that the British never captured it.
Q 21The 1966 coup that overthrew Ghana's first president was code-named what?
Operation Cold Chop
Operation Cold Chop: the plotters struck while the president was abroad on a mission to North Vietnam and China, then ruled as the National Liberation Council.
Q 22Ghana's currency is called what?
Cedi
Cedi: decades of inflation led Ghana in 2007 to swap 10,000 old cedis for one new Ghana cedi.
Q 23Ghana lies on which body of water?
Gulf of Guinea
Gulf of Guinea: Ghana struck oil beneath its waters in 2007, when the offshore Jubilee field was discovered.
Q 14The 1900 War of the Golden Stool began after Governor Frederick Hodgson demanded what?
To sit on it
To sit on it: Hodgson also ordered a search for the stool, and the Asante rose in 1900 and besieged the British fort at Kumasi.
Q 15Yaa Asantewaa, who commanded the Asante in the 1900 war against the British, held which position?
Queen mother
Queen mother of Ejisu: Yaa Asantewaa shamed hesitant chiefs into fighting, and after the defeat the British exiled her to the Seychelles, where she died in 1921.
Q 16Elmina Castle, begun by the Portuguese in 1482, holds what distinction?
Oldest European building in sub-Saharan Africa
Oldest European building in sub-Saharan Africa: the Dutch later seized it from the Portuguese, and in 1872 they handed it to Britain.
Q 17Which nation's company built Cape Coast Castle as a timber fort in the 1650s?
Sweden
Sweden: yet Hendrik Carloff, who had founded the Swedish colony, later came back in Danish service and seized the fort.
Q 18By Asante tradition, kente cloth originated in which town?
Bonwire
Bonwire: yet kente is not Asante cloth alone, since the Ewe people of southern Ghana weave their own kente too.
Q 19Ghana's adinkra symbols often carry meanings drawn from what?
A proverb or historical event
A proverb or historical event: Sankofa, drawn as a backward-looking bird or a heart, became a diaspora symbol engraved at the African Burial Ground memorial.
Q 20Jerry Rawlings, who ruled Ghana in 1979 and from 1981 to 2001, came to power holding what military rank?
Flight lieutenant
Flight lieutenant: Rawlings kept the junior air force rank through both his coups (1979 and 1981) and his years as head of state, before winning the 1992 election that launched the Fourth Republic.
Q 24The Prime Meridian passes through which Ghanaian port town, near the capital?
Tema
Tema: the port city was built on the site of the fishing village of Torman, whose people were moved out to a new site nearby.
Q 25Which is the largest ethnic group in Ghana?
Akan
Akan: the Asante, one of its peoples, built their own empire around Kumasi.
Q 26Which religion do about seven in ten Ghanaians follow?
Christianity
Christianity: yet Islam reached Ghana first, brought by Muslim traders from the Sahel.
Q 27Highlife, Ghana's guitar-and-horn dance genre, first emerged in which part of the country?
Ghana's coastal cities
Ghana's coastal cities: in the 1990s, Ghanaian artists mixed highlife with hip hop to create hiplife.
Q 28The trickster Anansi of Ghanaian folklore is most commonly depicted as what creature?
A spider
A spider: Anansi's tales crossed the Atlantic with enslaved Africans and live on in Caribbean folklore as the Anancy stories.
Q 29Kakum National Park's best-known attraction is what?
A canopy walkway
A canopy walkway: Kakum's 350-metre walkway, opened in 1995, hangs about 40 metres above the forest floor on a chain of seven suspension bridges between treetops.
Q 30The nationalist convention formed in August 1947 to seek self-government was led by which group?
The Big Six
The Big Six: the colonial government blamed the convention for the 1948 riots and arrested all six of its leaders.