Kalahari Trivia
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49 free Kalahari trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Kalahari trivia quiz covers the great semi-arid sand sea of southern Africa, a 'desert' with too much grass to be a true one. The easy questions handle the basics: which countries it covers, what the name means in Tswana, the colour of its sand, the only permanent river, the small mongoose that stands sentry on its dunes and the film about a bottle that fell from the sky. From there it moves through the geography, the ancient Lake Makgadikgadi and its salt pans, the Okavango Delta that became UNESCO's 1000th World Heritage Site, and the wildlife from gemsbok to brown hyena. The harder half is for travellers and naturalists: the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and Africa's first peace park, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and the eviction of the San, the Tsodilo Hills rock art, the Kalahari Debate among anthropologists, the arrow poison from beetle larvae, the Eye of Kuruman, camel thorn seeds as coffee, the meerkat's immunity to scorpion venom, and the Kalahari Meerkat Project behind Meerkat Manor. If you enjoyed our Sahara or Africa quizzes, this is the deep dive on one landscape. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the Kalahari Desert, its parks, peoples and animals before publishing.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What colour is the sand that covers vast areas of the Kalahari?
Red
Red sand covers much of the Kalahari because a thin layer of iron oxide, in effect rust, coats each grain.
Q 02The name Kalahari is said to come from a Tswana word meaning what?
The great thirst
The great thirst is the usual gloss of the Tswana word kgala, and it fits: most of the Kalahari has no streams at all, and standing water lies only in a few scattered waterholes.
Q 03Roughly how large is the Kalahari Desert?
About 900,000 sq km
About 900,000 sq km is the usual estimate, yet across all that space only one river, the Okavango, flows the whole year round.
Q 04Why do geographers hesitate to call the Kalahari a true desert?
Too much grows there
Too much grows there: grasses and thorn trees cover most of the sand, and the north has open woodland and even forest, so much of it counts as dry savanna.
Q 05Which true desert lies immediately to the west of the Kalahari?
The Namib
The Namib is a strip of coastal desert along the Atlantic, almost rainless yet often wrapped in fog bred by the cold Benguela Current; the Kalahari merges with it in the southwest.
Q 06In what form does most of the Kalahari's rain arrive?
Summer thunderstorms
Summer thunderstorms bring nearly all of it, and the water sinks straight into the deep sand; in winter no rain falls for six to eight months.
Q 07During which months is frost common in the Kalahari?
June to August
June to August is midwinter south of the equator, and on this high plateau the clear, dry air lets the day's heat escape, so nights commonly drop to freezing.
Q 08Which cavern beneath the Kalahari holds the largest documented non-subglacial underground lake?
Dragon's Breath Cave
Dragon's Breath Cave was named for the warm, humid air that rises from its mouth; the lake hidden below was only discovered in 1986.
Q 09Which Kalahari antelope is famous for pronking?
Springbok
The springbok pronks when alarmed or excited, bouncing stiff-legged high into the air with its back arched, a display thought to warn the herd or confuse a predator.
Q 10Which spiky orange fruit with green, jelly-like flesh is native to the Kalahari region?
The kiwano
The kiwano is native to much of Africa south of the Sahara, but its name is a trademark coined in New Zealand, where farmers began raising it for export in the 1980s.
Q 11The languages of the Kalahari San are famous for which unusual sounds?
Clicks
Clicks are written with signs such as ! and ǂ, which is why names like ǃKung and Nǃxau look so strange in print: the exclamation mark stands for a sharp pop of the tongue.
Q 12In what do the San traditionally store water in the Kalahari?
Blown-out ostrich eggshells
Blown-out ostrich eggshells make light, strong canteens; in a drought the San suck water up from damp sand through a hollow grass stem and let it run into the shell.
Q 13The San tip their arrows with diamphotoxin, a slow-acting poison produced by what?
Beetle larvae
Q 21The Central Kalahari Game Reserve covers almost a tenth of Botswana, an area about the size of which European country?
Croatia
Croatia, at about 56,600 sq km, is only a little larger than the reserve's 52,800; in 2008 bush fires scorched roughly four-fifths of the reserve.
Q 22The San's removal from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, ruled unlawful in 2006, came after prospectors found what there?
Diamonds
Diamonds were assessed at Gope in 1996 and the removals began the next year; the government denied any link, but a mine opened inside the reserve in 2014.
Q 23In which Central Kalahari valley did Mark and Delia Owens camp for seven years, as told in Cry of the Kalahari?
Deception Valley
Beetle larvae of the genus Diamphidia supply the toxin, which bursts the blood's oxygen-carrying cells, so a wounded animal weakens only slowly.
Q 14Which South African writer brought the Kalahari San to world attention in the 1950s with The Lost World of the Kalahari?
Laurens van der Post
Laurens van der Post first made the journey for a six-part BBC television series in 1956; the book of the same name followed two years later and became his best-known work.
Q 15Anthropologists' 'Kalahari Debate', begun in the 1980s, asks whether the San were always what?
Isolated hunter-gatherers
Isolated hunter-gatherers is how Richard Lee's camp saw them; revisionists led by Edwin Wilmsen argued that the San had long traded with, and been pushed aside by, their neighbours.
Q 16In the 1980 comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy, what falls from a plane among a band of Kalahari hunters?
A Coca-Cola bottle
A Coca-Cola bottle, tossed from a passing plane, is taken for a gift of the gods; when the band starts fighting over it, the hunter Xi sets off to give it back.
Q 17Jamie Uys's 1980 Kalahari comedy was shot in Botswana and in Tsumkwe, in what is now which country?
Namibia
Namibia, then South African-run South West Africa, was home to the film's star, Nǃxau ǂToma, a bush farmer who had reportedly seen only three white people before he was cast.
Q 18Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park straddles the border between Botswana and which country?
South Africa
South Africa holds about a quarter of the park and Botswana the rest; the border between the two halves has no fence, so the animals cross it freely.
Q 19How often are the Nossob and Auob rivers in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park said to flow?
About once a century
About once a century is the old saying, though the beds may run briefly after a big storm; water moving underground keeps their grass and thorn trees alive in between.
Q 20The lions of the Kalahari are famous for which trait?
Black manes
Black manes are the trademark of the big Kalahari males, and more than decoration: in lions a dark mane signals a well-fed male high in testosterone, though it also makes him run hotter.
Deception Valley is a fossil riverbed in the heart of the reserve; Delia Owens, who studied its lions and other carnivores, later wrote the novel Where the Crawdads Sing.
Q 24The Okavango Delta became which numbered site on the UNESCO World Heritage List in June 2014?
The 1000th
The 1000th inscription went to a wetland whose flood arrives in the dry winter months, drawing animals from far around just when the land about it is at its driest.
Q 25The Okavango's annual flood begins as rain in the highlands of which country?
Angola
Angola's uplands feed both the Okavango and the Cuando; after an unusually wet season there, the overflow can run on past the delta to fill Lake Ngami and reach the great salt pans.
Q 26What happens to nearly all the water that reaches the Okavango Delta?
It evaporates or is used by plants
It evaporates or is used by plants: almost none flows out, so a great river simply ends in the swamps of northern Botswana without ever reaching the sea.
Q 27Which tree is a landmark of the Makgadikgadi pans and the northern Kalahari?
Baobab
The baobab is one of the largest and strangest trees of the region; one giant near the pans, named after the explorer James Chapman, is said to have served 19th-century travellers as a post office.
Q 28A 2019 DNA study named the ancient Makgadikgadi wetland as the possible homeland of which species?
Homo sapiens
Homo sapiens, the study argued, arose about 200,000 years ago beside what was then a vast, fertile lake, and stayed for some 70,000 years before spreading out.
Q 29Which birds arrive on the Makgadikgadi pans in tens of thousands during the rainy season?
Flamingos
Flamingos flock in when rain floods the salt crust, and the pans are one of the few places in southern Africa where they breed; zebra and wildebeest follow the new grass.
Q 30What kind of animal is a meerkat?
A small mongoose
A small mongoose, the meerkat forages in packs while one animal stands upright as a sentinel, watching for eagles and other predators and barking the alarm.