Liberia Trivia
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47 free Liberia trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Liberia is Africa's oldest republic, founded by freed Black Americans and named for liberty, with a capital named after a US president and a flag that looks like the Stars and Stripes. It has been a rubber empire, a Cold War ally, the scene of two devastating civil wars, the home of Africa's first elected woman president and a Ballon d'Or-winning president, and the flag on more than a tenth of the world's ships. This Liberia trivia quiz covers all of it. Forty-four questions run from geography (Monrovia and Cape Mesurado, Mount Wuteve, Nimba, the Mano and Cavalla rivers, Sapo National Park, the pygmy hippo) through history (the Pepper Coast, the American Colonization Society, 1822, Joseph Jenkins Roberts and 1847, the True Whig Party, Firestone's 99-year lease, Tubman, the 1980 coup, Doe, Taylor, the civil wars, Sirleaf and Gbowee, Ebola, Weah and Boakai) to culture and economy (the Lone Star flag, the Kpelle, English, the Liberian dollar, the ship registry, iron ore, football). Roughly a third are easy, a third medium, and the rest are for people who really know West Africa. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedia and official pages, so the dates, numbers and names are ones you can rely on.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital and largest city of Liberia?
Monrovia
Monrovia was named for US President James Monroe, in whose term the settlement was founded as a home for free Black settlers from the US.
Q 02The site of Liberia's capital was bought in 1821 for guns, tobacco and which spirit?
Rum
Rum went into the bargain with gunpowder, umbrellas, hats and mirrors: a US naval officer and the settlers' agent struck the deal with local rulers for a strip of coast at Cape Mesurado, and the settlers moved in the next year.
Q 03Which organisation, formed in 1816, sent free Black settlers from the United States to West Africa?
American Colonization Society
The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816 with backers including Henry Clay, planted its first lasting settlement in 1822; its members ranged from Quakers to slaveholders.
Q 04Liberia's early settlers included thousands of 'recaptives', Africans freed from what?
Intercepted slave ships
Intercepted slave ships supplied them: after the Atlantic slave trade was banned, the US Navy put several thousand Africans freed from seized slavers ashore in Liberia.
Q 05When Liberia declared independence in 1847, it became the world's second Black republic after which country?
Haiti
Haiti had won its independence from France in 1804; Liberia followed on 26 July 1847, when its settlers broke from the private organisation that had governed them.
Q 06Who was elected the first president of independent Liberia, serving from 1848 to 1856?
Joseph Jenkins Roberts
Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a Virginia-born merchant, governed the colony before independence; he was called back to the presidency in 1872 after Edward Roye was deposed.
Q 07Besides Liberia, which was the only African country to escape European rule during the Scramble for Africa?
Ethiopia
Ethiopia kept its independence by defeating an Italian army at Adwa in 1896, while Liberia was treated as under the protection of the United States; every other part of the continent was claimed.
Q 08Portuguese traders named the coast of modern Liberia after which local product?
Pepper
Pepper, specifically melegueta pepper or 'grains of paradise', grew abundantly here, so Europeans called it the Pepper Coast or Grain Coast.
Q 09What do the eleven stripes on Liberia's flag honour?
Declaration signers
Declaration signers: eleven men signed Liberia's Declaration of Independence in 1847, so the flag's makers cut the thirteen stripes of the colony's US-style flag to eleven.
Q 10The Liberian flag is occasionally called by what nickname?
The Lone Star
The Lone Star is the flag's single white star, chosen to mark Liberia as Africa's first independent republic; the flag was first raised on 24 August 1847, now Flag Day.
Q 11Which political force ruled Liberia without a break for over a century, until the 1980 coup?
True Whig Party
True Whig Party presidents governed continuously from 1878 until soldiers killed President William Tolbert in the 1980 coup, ending the party's 102 years in power.
Q 12Which American company won a concession of a million acres of Liberia in 1926 to grow rubber?
Firestone
Firestone wanted rubber free of the European colonial planters who controlled supply; with the 1926 concession came a $5 million loan arranged through one of its subsidiaries.
Q 13Who was Liberia's longest-serving president, in office from 1944 until his death in 1971?
William Tubman
Q 21Which activist led the women's protests that pushed Liberia's warring sides to peace in 2003 and later shared a Nobel Prize?
Leymah Gbowee
Leymah Gbowee rallied thousands of Christian and Muslim women, dressed in white, to picket day after day; at the peace talks they blocked the hall until the delegates made progress.
Q 22Which former footballer was sworn in as Liberia's president in January 2018?
George Weah
George Weah, the 1995 Ballon d'Or winner, won at his second attempt, twelve years after losing the 2005 runoff; his inauguration was Liberia's first handover between elected leaders since 1944.
Q 23Liberia's footballer-president was at which club when he received the 1995 Ballon d'Or?
AC Milan
William Tubman's Open Door policy invited unrestricted foreign investment into Liberia, and he stayed in office for 27 years until his death.
Q 14Which master sergeant seized power in the 1980 coup, becoming Liberia's first indigenous leader?
Samuel Doe
Samuel Doe, a Krahn master sergeant, led the 12 April 1980 coup in which President Tolbert was killed; ten days later thirteen officials were publicly executed.
Q 15The 2003 peace agreement that ended Liberia's second civil war was signed in which city?
Accra
Accra, Ghana's capital, hosted the talks; the peace agreement signed there in August 2003 set up a transitional government and cleared the way for the 2005 election.
Q 16Which rebel leader, after splitting from Charles Taylor, captured and killed Liberia's president in 1990?
Prince Johnson
Prince Johnson, whose INPFL had broken away from the National Patriotic Front, seized the president at the peacekeepers' base in the capital's port on 9 September 1990 and had him tortured and killed.
Q 17Charles Taylor's rebels launched Liberia's first civil war in 1989 by invading from which country?
Ivory Coast
Ivory Coast was the springboard: only a small band of rebels crossed the border on Christmas Eve, yet within a year Taylor's forces held most of Liberia.
Q 18Roughly how many people died in Liberia's two civil wars?
About 250,000
About 250,000 people are thought to have died in the two wars, which ran on and off for 14 years, and far more were driven from their homes.
Q 19Charles Taylor was sentenced to 50 years in 2012 for backing diamond-funded rebels in which conflict?
The Sierra Leone Civil War
The Sierra Leone Civil War was the basis of the charges: Taylor, in exile in Nigeria from 2003, was handed to a UN-backed court in 2006 and tried in The Hague for arming the rebels.
Q 20Who was elected in 2005 as the first female president in Africa?
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf had been handed a 10-year prison sentence in 1985 for criticising the military government; two decades later she won the presidency and served two terms.
AC Milan signed him from Paris Saint-Germain in 1995, months before he received the Ballon d'Or, and he went on to help the club win the 1996 and 1999 Serie A titles.
Q 24Who won Liberia's 2023 presidential runoff and took office in January 2024?
Joseph Boakai
Joseph Boakai won a rematch of the 2017 runoff he had lost, edging the incumbent by 50.6% to 49.4%; his rival conceded once the result was clear.
Q 25The 2014 Ebola outbreak spread into Liberia from which country?
Guinea
Guinea was where the outbreak began; within months it had spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone and reached all three capitals, becoming the largest Ebola epidemic ever recorded.
Q 26In the 2000s, Liberia's flag-of-convenience registry ranked second in the world behind which country's?
Panama
Panama's registry was the only one ahead of Liberia's in that decade; Liberia's own had grown into the world's largest by the late 1960s.
Q 27What is Liberia's official language?
English
English is the official language, a legacy of the American settlers; more than 20 indigenous languages are spoken by the 16 officially recognised ethnic groups.
Q 28Which is Liberia's largest ethnic group, at about a fifth of the population?
Kpelle
The Kpelle live mainly in central Liberia, and their paramount chiefs double as government officials, mediating between their people and the state.
Q 29Alongside its own currency, which foreign currency is legal tender in Liberia?
US dollar
The US dollar is legal tender beside the Liberian dollar; for decades Liberia minted its own coins but printed no banknotes, leaving American notes to do the job.
Q 30A planned increase in the cost of which staple food set off deadly riots in Liberia in 1979?
Rice
Rice was the spark: a government plan to make it dearer brought protesters onto the streets in 1979, dozens were killed, and a year later the government fell to a coup.