Guinea
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48 free Guinea trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Guinea trivia quiz is about the West African republic often called Guinea-Conakry, not Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea or Papua New Guinea. It covers the empires of Mali and Wassoulou, the Islamic state of the Fouta Djallon, French rule, the famous 1958 vote for immediate independence and Sékou Touré's long dictatorship, the coups of 1984, 2008 and 2021, and the 2013 outbreak that started the West African Ebola epidemic. It also visits the country's riches: the world's biggest bauxite reserves, the Simandou iron mountains, the water tower of West Africa and Mount Nimba's viviparous toads. The first questions suit anyone who can tell the Guineas apart; the last ones test people who know which rivers rise in the highlands and what the currency was called in the 1970s. 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 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital of Guinea, whose name is often added to tell the country from other Guineas?
Conakry
Conakry gives the country its informal name, Guinea-Conakry, because Guinea-Bissau and Equatorial Guinea also take their names from the historic Guinea region of Africa's Atlantic coast.
Q 02Which French leader did Sékou Touré defy to his face in 1958?
De Gaulle
De Gaulle heard Touré declare, in a speech in Guinea's capital, that his people preferred poverty in freedom to riches in slavery, and took it badly: he soon ordered French civil servants and technicians out of Guinea.
Q 03In the 1958 French referendum, Guinea was the only African colony to do what?
Vote for immediate independence
Guinea alone chose to vote for immediate independence, with more than 95% saying no to the new French constitution; France answered by ordering its civil servants and technicians home.
Q 04Which African leader, overthrown in a 1966 coup, spent the rest of his life in exile in Guinea?
Kwame Nkrumah
Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's founding president, was given asylum by his ally Sékou Touré, who named him honorary co-president of Guinea and threatened to send troops to restore him.
Q 05Which exiled singer settled in Guinea with her new husband, a leader of America's Black Power movement?
Miriam Makeba
Miriam Makeba, already barred from her native South Africa, saw her American career falter after the marriage, so she moved to Guinea and kept recording and touring across Africa and Europe.
Q 06Guinea holds the world's largest deposits of which mineral, shipped mostly to China?
Bauxite
Bauxite is the ore of aluminium, and Guinea's boom in it has a cost: around Boké the red dust from mines and haul roads smothers fields, and riots broke out there in 2017.
Q 07Guinea's Fouta Djallon highlands are nicknamed what because so many rivers rise there?
The water tower of West Africa
The water tower of West Africa feeds several of the region's great rivers, so rain that falls on its sandstone plateaus ends up watering farms hundreds of miles downstream.
Q 08Which river rises in Guinea only 150 miles from the Atlantic, yet flows 2,600 miles to reach it?
Niger
The Niger starts by running away from the sea, north-east to the edge of the Sahara, before bending near Timbuktu and turning south-east to reach the ocean in Nigeria.
Q 09Guinea's highest peak, Mount Nimba, stands where the country meets Liberia and which other neighbour?
Ivory Coast
Ivory Coast shares the 1,752-metre summit, the highest point of both countries, and chimpanzees on the mountain's forested slopes crack nuts with stone tools.
Q 10The 2014 West African epidemic of which disease began in the Guinean village of Meliandou?
Ebola
Ebola's first known victim was a toddler in Meliandou, a village of only 31 households, who had been seen playing near a hollow tree heavily infested with bats, the virus's suspected hosts.
Q 11In 2021 a military faction overthrew which Guinean president and suspended the constitution?
Alpha Condé
Alpha Condé, Guinea's first democratically elected leader, changed the constitution in 2020 to give himself a third term; a year later soldiers arrested him and dissolved his government.
Q 12In September 2009 Guinean junta troops killed more than 150 opposition protesters gathered where in the capital?
The national stadium
The national stadium was hosting a rally against junta chief Moussa Dadis Camara's plan to run for president; in 2024 a Guinean court found him guilty of crimes against humanity over the killings.
Q 13What ended Lansana Conté's rule of Guinea, begun in a 1984 coup?
His death
Q 21The Guinean novelist Camara Laye is best known for which autobiographical novel?
The African Child
The African Child, written in French as L'Enfant noir, recalls his boyhood in Kouroussa in a family of goldsmiths; he later fell out with Sékou Touré's government and died in exile abroad.
Q 22Guinean singer Mory Kanté, of the Mandinka griot tradition, was a master of which instrument?
Kora
Kora was not his first instrument: raised on the balafon, he taught himself the harp while playing in a Bamako band, then put it at the centre of his late-1980s dance hit 'Yé ké yé ké'.
Q 23The Sosso Bala, guarded in a Guinean village and said to date from Sundiata's era, is what kind of instrument?
A xylophone
His death in December 2008 ended 24 years in power, and within hours Captain Moussa Dadis Camara had seized control in yet another coup.
Q 14Which French World Cup winner has twin older brothers who both played international football for Guinea?
Paul Pogba
Paul Pogba was born near Paris to Guinean parents, while his twin older brothers Florentin and Mathias, both born in Guinea, chose to play for the land of their birth.
Q 15Between 1971 and 1985 Guinea's currency was called what?
Syli
Syli notes were divided into 100 cauris, a nod to the cowrie shells once used as money, but the experiment ended in 1985 when the Guinean franc it had replaced was brought back.
Q 16Guinea's largest ethnic-linguistic groups are the Susu, the Pular-speaking Fula and which third?
Maninka
Maninka, also called Malinké, has an alphabet of its own: N'Ko, devised in 1949 by Solomana Kanté and first used in Kankan, partly to answer claims that Africa had no writing systems.
Q 17Between 85 and 90 percent of Guineans follow which religion?
Islam
Islam, mostly of the Sunni Maliki school, is the faith of the great majority, yet many Guinean Muslims and Christians alike weave older indigenous rituals into their practice.
Q 18The Fouta Djallon's Fulani state eased its succession fights in 1845 when two rival families agreed to do what?
Take turns ruling
Take turns ruling: the Soriya and Alfaya families swapped the imamate every two years, and when one ruler refused to hand over in 1896, France used it as a pretext to depose him.
Q 19Which country got its name when a Spanish explorer thought its people resembled those of Africa's Guinea coast?
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea carries the name Yñigo Ortiz de Retez gave its island in the 1540s; gold from that same African coast later gave the guinea, an old gold coin, its name as well.
Q 20Guinea's best Africa Cup of Nations finish came in 1976, when it was runner-up to which champion?
Morocco
Morocco trailed Guinea in the deciding match until an 86th-minute equaliser made it 1-1, which was enough to keep the trophy out of Guinean hands.
A xylophone: the Sosso Bala is a sacred balafon about 1.5 metres long, and in the Sundiata epic a griot wins his place at court by sneaking in to play it.
Q 24Which drum's name is said to come from a Bambara phrase meaning 'everyone gather together in peace'?
Djembe
The djembe, a rope-tuned goblet drum played with bare hands, reached audiences beyond West Africa through Les Ballets Africains, founded in 1952 and later made Guinea's national ballet.
Q 25Sundiata Keita's 1235 victory over the Sosso at Kirina gave rise to which great state spanning Guinea?
Mali Empire
The Mali Empire peaked under Mansa Musa, whose lavish gifts in Cairo on his 1324 pilgrimage are said to have knocked down the value of gold in Egypt.
Q 26Guinea's four natural regions are Maritime, Upper, Forest and which highland region?
Middle Guinea
Middle Guinea is the Fouta Djallon plateau, where Fulani herders raise the small N'Dama, a local cattle breed that shrugs off the tsetse-borne sickness fatal to most other cattle.
Q 27From 1978 to 1984, Sékou Touré's one-party Guinea carried which official name?
People's Revolutionary Republic
People's Revolutionary Republic of Guinea lasted only as long as its author: within days of his death in 1984 the army took power, and the plain Republic of Guinea came back.
Q 28Guinea's Simandou range holds a vast high-grade deposit of which metal, first exported from there in 2025?
Iron
Iron: Simandou was long called the world's largest untapped high-grade deposit, stalled for decades by ownership fights, bribery claims and the need for a railway of more than 600 km to the sea.
Q 29Which country borders Guinea to the north, between Guinea-Bissau and Mali?
Senegal
Senegal completes Guinea's ring of six neighbours with Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sierra Leone; The Gambia misses out because Senegal wraps around it on every landward side.
Q 30The Mount Nimba Strict Nature Reserve is famous for Nimbaphrynoides, a genus of toads that do what?
Give birth to live young
Give birth to live young: instead of laying eggs, the Nimba toad carries her offspring inside her until they emerge as tiny, fully formed toadlets, a trick shared by only a handful of other frogs and toads.