Haiti Trivia
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50 free Haiti trivia questions with answers. Haiti was the first Black republic, the only nation ever founded by a successful slave revolt, and the second independent country in the Americas. This Haiti trivia quiz covers all of it: the Taíno name that means land of high mountains, Saint-Domingue and the 1791 uprising, Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines and King Henri Christophe, the Citadelle, the 1825 indemnity to France, the US occupation, the Duvaliers, Aristide, the 2010 earthquake and the 2021 assassination of Jovenel Moïse. It is not only history. There are questions on Haitian Creole and Vodou, soup joumou and griot, Barbancourt rum, konpa music, Wyclef Jean and Sweet Micky, the flag and the national motto, the highest peak, the longest river, the 1974 World Cup team, and Haitian-born names like Michaëlle Jean and Edwidge Danticat. It works for Haitian Flag Day on 18 May, Haitian Heritage Month, a classroom unit or a family quiz night. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference source, and the questions run from easy to genuinely hard, so beginners and Haitians alike will find something to argue over.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola with which other country?
Dominican Republic
The Dominican Republic won its independence not from Spain but from Haiti, which ruled the whole island from 1822 until the Dominicans broke away in 1844.
Q 02What is the capital and largest city of Haiti?
Port-au-Prince
Port-au-Prince's century-old wooden 'gingerbread' houses rode out the 2010 earthquake far better than the modern city around them, thanks to their flexible timber frames.
Q 03The name Haiti comes from a Taíno word usually translated as what?
Land of high mountains
Land of high mountains is the usual reading of Ayiti, probably the Taíno name for the whole island; the revolutionaries revived it in 1804 to replace the colonial name.
Q 04What are the two official languages of Haiti?
French and Haitian Creole
French and Haitian Creole are both official under the 1987 constitution, which calls Creole the one language uniting all Haitians; only a minority speak French.
Q 05Which US president finally recognised Haiti's independence, 58 years after it was declared?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln recognised Haiti in 1862; for decades before, American leaders had shunned the republic, fearing its example would stir revolt among the enslaved in the South.
Q 06Defeat in Haiti helped persuade Napoleon to sell which territory to the United States in 1803?
Louisiana
Louisiana lost its point for Napoleon once disease and the rebel army had wrecked his forces in Haiti, so he offered startled American envoys the whole territory for $15 million.
Q 07Before independence, Haiti was a European colony known by what name?
Saint-Domingue
Saint-Domingue made France rich on sugar and coffee, but by 1789 its enslaved workers outnumbered white colonists about ten to one, and within two years they rose in revolt.
Q 08Which Haitian Revolution leader was seized by Napoleon's troops and died in a French mountain prison in 1803?
Toussaint Louverture
Toussaint Louverture was arrested in 1802 and shipped to Fort de Joux, a fortress in the Jura mountains, where he died in April 1803, months before the independence he had fought for.
Q 09Who declared Haiti's independence in 1804 and became its first emperor?
Jean-Jacques Dessalines
Jean-Jacques Dessalines crowned himself Emperor Jacques I within months of independence and was assassinated at Pont-Rouge in October 1806.
Q 10Which disease ravaged Napoleon's army in Haiti and killed its commander, his brother-in-law?
Yellow fever
Yellow fever killed General Charles Leclerc, husband of Napoleon's sister Pauline, in November 1802, along with thousands of his soldiers; the survivors surrendered a year later.
Q 11Which revolutionary leader crowned himself king of northern Haiti in 1811?
Henri Christophe
Henri Christophe ruled the north as King Henry I, created a nobility of dukes and counts, built the mountaintop Citadelle, and shot himself in 1820 as his army mutinied.
Q 12Which liberator did Haiti arm in 1816 for a promise to free the enslaved?
Simón Bolívar
Simón Bolívar reached Haiti as a beaten exile; President Alexandre Pétion gave him money and weapons on one condition, that he free the enslaved wherever he won.
Q 13What did France demand from Haiti in 1825 as the price of recognising its independence?
A huge cash payment
Q 21The gunmen who assassinated Haitian president Jovenel Moïse in 2021 were mostly former soldiers from which country?
Colombia
Colombia was home to most of the gunmen, ex-soldiers hired through a Florida security firm, who stormed the president's house above the capital before dawn on 7 July 2021.
Q 22What is the national currency of Haiti?
The gourde
The gourde was long fixed at five to the US dollar, which left behind the 'Haitian dollar', a fictitious unit of five gourdes that prices are often quoted in though no such note exists.
Q 23What lies across the Windward Passage from Haiti's north-west tip?
Cuba
Cuba is so near that when tens of thousands of Haitians fled by boat after the 1991 coup, the US held those it stopped at sea in tent camps at its Guantánamo Bay base there.
A huge cash payment of 150 million gold francs, later cut to 90 million, was to compensate former slave owners for their losses, and the debt was not cleared until 1947.
Q 14Which horror monster reached American pop culture from Haiti during the 1915–34 US occupation?
Zombie
The zombie reached American readers through William Seabrook's 1929 Haiti travel book The Magic Island, and by 1932 Hollywood had Bela Lugosi commanding the undead in White Zombie.
Q 15What was the nickname of François Duvalier, dictator of Haiti from 1957 to 1971?
Papa Doc
Papa Doc came from François Duvalier's earlier career as a physician in rural public-health campaigns; he had himself declared president for life in 1964.
Q 16What was the name of the feared death squad that enforced the Duvalier regime?
The Tonton Macoute
The Tonton Macoute, officially the Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale, took their name from a Haitian folk bogeyman, Uncle Gunnysack, who carries off children in a sack.
Q 17What ended Jean-Claude Duvalier's 15-year rule over Haiti in 1986?
A popular uprising
A popular uprising, after a wave of street protests, sent him into exile in France, ending 29 years of rule by father and son; he returned in 2011 to face corruption charges.
Q 18Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who served several terms as Haiti's president from 1991, had earlier been what?
A Salesian priest
Aristide was a Salesian priest, expelled from the order in 1988 over his fiery liberation-theology sermons to the capital's poor, before winning the December 1990 election.
Q 19Which disease, unseen in Haiti for a century, did UN peacekeepers bring after the 2010 earthquake?
Cholera
Cholera came with peacekeepers from Nepal whose base leaked sewage into a river, and it killed about 10,000 Haitians; the UN denied any part for six years before apologising.
Q 20Which Oscar-winning actor ran a tent camp for Haitians made homeless by the 2010 earthquake?
Sean Penn
Sean Penn ended up managing the golf-course camp himself, and the relief group he founded was still at work in Haiti almost a decade later.
Q 24What is the longest river in Haiti, and on the whole island of Hispaniola?
Artibonite
The Artibonite waters Haiti's main rice valley, whose farmers were undercut when tariffs on subsidised American rice were slashed in the 1990s, a policy Bill Clinton publicly apologised for in 2010.
Q 25Which is the largest of the islands lying off Haiti's coast?
Gonâve
Gonâve, about 60 km long, lies in the bay west of the capital; by his own account its villagers crowned an American Marine sergeant named Wirkus as their king in 1926.
Q 26The island of Tortuga off Haiti's north coast was famous in the 17th century as a haven for what?
Pirates
French buccaneers based there raided Spanish shipping, and the island later lent its name to the pirate port in the Pirates of the Caribbean films.
Q 27Which French novelist's father was born enslaved in colonial Haiti?
Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas's father, born into slavery near Jérémie, joined the French army as a private under his mother's name and rose to general; his son wrote The Three Musketeers.
Q 28Which African American leader was US minister to Haiti from 1889 to 1891?
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass saw an American admiral sent over his head to press Haiti for a naval base at Môle Saint-Nicolas; Haiti refused, and he resigned in 1891.
Q 29From the remains of which ship did Columbus build La Navidad on Haiti's coast in 1492?
The Santa María
The Santa María, Columbus's flagship, ran aground on Christmas Day 1492; timbers from the wreck built La Navidad, whose 39 men were all dead when he returned in 1493.
Q 30Which famous naturalist was born in Haiti in 1785, the son of a French sea captain?
John James Audubon
John James Audubon was born on his father's sugar plantation at Les Cayes, raised in France and sent to America at 18 to dodge Napoleon's draft; there he painted The Birds of America.