Johannesburg Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
55 free Johannesburg trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Johannesburg trivia quiz covers South Africa's largest city from the day gold was found on a Witwatersrand farm in 1886 to the G20 summit of 2025. The early questions deal with the prospectors, the disputed origin of the name, the miners' camp that became Ferreirasdorp, the Jameson Raid, the Boer War occupation and the Chinese labourers brought in for the mines. It then turns to apartheid: the townships built to house black workers, the naming of Soweto, the Rivonia raid, the 1976 uprising and the street where two Nobel laureates lived. The middle section is about the place itself: why the streets are 1,753 metres up, what 'Witwatersrand' and 'fontein' mean, which rivers the ridge divides, how rare snow is, the six million trees, and the mines that reach four kilometres underground. Then come the modern city's landmarks and institutions: Sandton, the Hillbrow Tower, FNB Stadium and Ellis Park, the Wanderers, Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates, O. R. Tambo airport, the Gautrain and Rea Vaya, Wits and the University of Johannesburg, and Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital. Some questions are easy for anyone who knows South Africa; others will test Joburgers themselves. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on Johannesburg, Soweto and the Witwatersrand Gold Rush.
30 of 55 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is Johannesburg's Zulu name, which refers to its founding mineral?
iGoli
iGoli means 'place of gold' in Zulu: the city sprang from the 1886 gold rush and grew from a mining camp to 100,000 people within a decade.
Q 02Johannesburg is the capital of which South African province?
Gauteng
Gauteng is the smallest of South Africa's nine provinces by area, yet it holds the largest share of the country's people.
Q 03Which of South Africa's highest institutions sits in Johannesburg?
The Constitutional Court
The Constitutional Court sits on Constitution Hill, on the site of the notorious Old Fort prison, and bricks from a demolished cell block were built into its new building.
Q 04Which restaurant chain began in 1987 at a small Portuguese eatery in Rosettenville, Johannesburg?
Nando's
Nando's began when two friends had lunch at a modest Portuguese eatery in Rosettenville in 1987 and decided its peri-peri chicken deserved a far wider audience.
Q 05The name Soweto is an abbreviation of what?
South Western Townships
South Western Townships was a plain map label for the scattered Black townships set aside on that side of Johannesburg, which together grew into the country's largest Black urban complex.
Q 06Which decommissioned power station left Soweto a pair of cooling towers that now serve as a bungee-jumping site?
Orlando Power Station
Orlando Power Station shut in 1998, and jumpers now leap from a platform slung between the tops of its two cooling towers.
Q 07What did prospector George Harrison do with the 1886 gold claim that gave rise to Johannesburg?
Sold it for £10
Sold it for £10: Harrison is said to have let his Langlaagte claim go for that sum and left for the eastern Transvaal goldfields, never sharing in the fortune his find unleashed.
Q 08Which World Heritage Site near Johannesburg includes the Sterkfontein Caves?
The Cradle of Humankind
The Cradle of Humankind is a belt of limestone caves whose fossils include early human ancestors and evidence that fire was being tamed there more than a million years ago.
Q 09Johann Rissik and Christiaan Joubert, credited as the source of the city's name, were involved in what?
Surveying the site for the settlement
Surveying the site for the settlement brought the Transvaal's vice president and its deputy surveyor-general to the diggings in 1886, and the new town apparently took the 'Johannes' both men had in their names.
Q 10Gold mines near Johannesburg hold which world record?
The deepest
The deepest mines on Earth grew out of geology: the gold-bearing layer dips away underground, so miners chased it down more than two miles, and Mponeng now reaches about four kilometres below the surface.
Q 11What are the towering pale-yellow hills that dot the landscape around Johannesburg?
Mine waste dumps
Mine waste dumps: the ore was so poor that tons of rock were crushed for every ounce of gold, and the leftovers were piled into pale hills that still line the old goldfields.
Q 12What does 'Witwatersrand' mean in English?
Ridge of white waters
Ridge of white waters is the literal reading; shortened to 'the Rand', the gold-bearing ridge later gave its name to South Africa's currency, adopted in 1961.
Q 13What does 'fontein', ending many farm names around the city, mean in the local Dutch-derived language?
Spring
Q 21Which Transvaal president, pictured on South Africa's gold bullion coin, went into exile after the British took Johannesburg in 1900?
Paul Kruger
Paul Kruger was sent to Europe to seek help for the Boers, found none, and died in Switzerland in 1904; since 1967 his bearded profile has been stamped on the Krugerrand.
Q 22After the South African War, Johannesburg's gold mines shipped in more than 60,000 indentured labourers from which country?
China
China supplied the stopgap labour; the scheme caused an outcry in the Transvaal and in Britain, and the miners had gone home again by about 1910.
Q 23Which corporation, founded by Ernest Oppenheimer, made Johannesburg its headquarters in 1917?
Anglo-American
Spring: in dry country any water was worth putting in a farm's name, so the ending marks where a natural spring once rose, as at Braamfontein and Doornfontein.
Q 14Rain north of Johannesburg's main ridge drains to the Indian Ocean; where does rain falling south of it end up?
The Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean: the ridge is a continental divide, so rain on its south side joins the Vaal and then the Orange River, and crosses the whole country to the far west coast.
Q 15What nickname was given to the mining magnates, such as Alfred Beit and Barney Barnato, who controlled Johannesburg's early gold industry?
Randlords
Randlords was the label for men like Beit and Barnato, who had already made fortunes on the Kimberley diamond fields and by the mid-1890s ran the whole gold industry through half a dozen mining houses.
Q 16Which weather event, rare for Johannesburg, reached the city in August 2012 and again in July 2023?
A snowfall
A snowfall is rare enough here that residents photographed it both times, and the 2023 flurries were the city's first in over a decade.
Q 17Which two-time NBA Most Valuable Player was born in Johannesburg in 1974?
Steve Nash
Steve Nash left South Africa as a toddler and was raised in Victoria, British Columbia; only one American college recruited him, yet he won back-to-back MVP awards in 2005 and 2006.
Q 18What covered the site of Johannesburg before the 1886 gold rush?
Open grassland
Open grassland with hardly a tree in sight greeted the first diggers; the trees came later, among them Australian blue gums that the mines planted for tunnel props.
Q 19Which 2009 science-fiction film leaves an alien mothership hovering over Johannesburg and its passengers fenced into a slum?
District 9
District 9 was shot in director Neill Blomkamp's home town; its aliens, nicknamed 'prawns', are hated, penned in and then evicted to a camp, a plain echo of apartheid's forced removals.
Q 20Which botched plot for a Johannesburg rising cost Cecil Rhodes his premiership?
Jameson Raid
The Jameson Raid was a fiasco: the rising in Johannesburg never came, the raiders were rounded up within days, and Rhodes had to resign as premier of the Cape Colony.
It grew into one of the world's largest companies, dominating South African gold and diamond mining.
Q 24Which singer, born in a Johannesburg township, was barred from returning home in 1960?
Miriam Makeba
Miriam Makeba, the 'Pata Pata' singer known as Mama Africa, spent three decades in exile with her records banned at home, and came back only in 1990.
Q 25Which document did a mass gathering at Kliptown, Soweto, adopt in 1955?
The Freedom Charter
The Freedom Charter was compiled from demands sent in by thousands of ordinary South Africans, and some 3,000 delegates of all races met at Kliptown over two days to adopt it.
Q 26Police raided Liliesleaf Farm, the secret base of the ANC's armed wing, in July 1963 in which Johannesburg suburb?
Rivonia
Rivonia gave its name to the trial that followed, whose most famous accused was not even there: Nelson Mandela was already in prison when the farm was raided, and was sentenced to life in 1964.
Q 27What happens to each visitor at the entrance to Johannesburg's Apartheid Museum?
Randomly classed by race
Randomly classed by race: each visitor is labelled 'white' or 'non-white' and may enter only through the gate for that group, a first taste of the sorting on which every apartheid law rested.
Q 28The 1976 Soweto uprising began as a protest against schooling black children in which language?
Afrikaans
Afrikaans was a language Soweto pupils used only with police and officials, so a 1974 order to teach mathematics and social studies in it sent thousands marching out of class on 16 June 1976.
Q 29Which public holiday marks the 1976 Soweto uprising?
Youth Day
Youth Day, 16 June, honours the school pupils who marched through Soweto that morning and were met with police tear gas and live bullets.
Q 30Which schoolboy killed on the first day of the 1976 Soweto uprising became its symbol, with a museum in his name?
Hector Pieterson
Hector Pieterson was among the first pupils shot when police opened fire; Sam Nzima's photograph of the dying boy being carried by a fellow student was published around the world.