Niger Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
49 free Niger trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Niger, not to be confused with its neighbour Nigeria, is a landlocked republic the size of Western Europe with four-fifths of its territory in the Sahara. It is named for the great river that curls through its south-west, was carved out of the trans-Saharan trading world of the Songhai, Kanem-Bornu and Hausa states, and has been through five coups since independence, the latest in 2023. This quiz covers the geography (Niamey, the Aïr Mountains and Mont Idoukal-n-Taghès, the Ténéré, Lake Chad, W National Park and the last West African giraffes), the empires and sultanates, Queen Sarraounia and the French conquest, the colony of 1922, Hamani Diori and independence on 3 August 1960, Kountché, Tandja and the 2023 junta. It also covers what Niger runs on and lives by: uranium from Arlit that once made it the world's fourth producer, the salt caravans to Bilma, the Cure Salée and the Wodaabe beauty pageant, the Hausa language and the ten national languages, the world-record fertility rate, the Tree of Ténéré and the flag with an orange disc. Easy questions ask which desert dominates; hard ones want the name of the 1916 Tuareg revolt and the year France finally occupied Agadez. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Niger, Niamey, the flag, Agadez, the Aïr Mountains, the Niger River, the Ténéré, the Tree of Ténéré, the Wodaabe and Niger's mining industry, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital of Niger?
Niamey
Niamey. It was a farming village on the Niger River when France made it the colony's capital in 1926; well over a million people live there now.
Q 02With most of Niger covered by the Sahara, where do most of its people live?
In the far south
In the far south. Most Nigeriens live on a narrow band of farmable land along the border with Nigeria and Benin, because the desert north is too dry for crops.
Q 03Which North African country borders Niger to the north-west?
Algeria
Algeria. Their 951 km border is just three straight lines across the Sahara, first drawn by French officers in 1905, when France ruled both sides.
Q 04Niger, Africa's sixth-largest country, is nearly twice the size of which US state?
Texas
Texas. Niger covers about 1.27 million km² but has no coast, so its imports have long come by road and rail from Benin's port of Cotonou.
Q 05Sarcosuchus, a giant predator whose fossils were dug from Niger's Sahara, was a prehistoric relative of which animal?
Crocodile
Crocodile. Nicknamed 'SuperCroc', it lived about 110 million years ago, when rivers ran through what is now desert, and was big enough to prey on dinosaurs.
Q 06The oasis town of Bilma in eastern Niger is famous for producing what?
Salt
Salt. Tuareg camel caravans have long crossed the Ténéré desert to Bilma's salt pans, then carried the salt south to Kano to trade for cloth, tools and grain.
Q 07The Niger River is the third-longest in Africa after which two rivers?
The Nile and the Congo
The Nile and the Congo. The Niger rises in Guinea but flows north-east, away from the ocean, to the edge of the Sahara before curving back to the Gulf of Guinea some 4,180 km later.
Q 08Which ethnic group makes up more than half of Niger's population?
Hausa
Hausa. In 2025 Niger's military rulers made Hausa the national language and demoted French, the language of colonial rule, to a working language.
Q 09Which Tuareg guitarist from Niger released the 2021 album Afrique Victime?
Mdou Moctar
Mdou Moctar. His songs first spread phone to phone by Bluetooth, and he starred in a Tuareg remake of Purple Rain titled 'Rain the Color of Blue with a Little Red in It', as his language has no word for purple.
Q 10Which mountain range in northern Niger gave its name to a Tuareg sultanate that Songhai conquered in the early 1500s?
Aïr
Aïr. The sultanate outlived its conqueror: Songhai fell to Moroccan invaders in 1591, while a sultan still sat in the desert capital when the French arrived in the early 1900s.
Q 11The Sultanate of Damagaram, founded around 1730-40, was centred on which town?
Zinder
Zinder. France governed its Niger colony from this walled caravan town until 1926, when the capital moved west to what was then a farming village.
Q 12Which medieval empire controlled the oases of Bilma and Kaouar in eastern Niger in the 13th century?
Kanem-Bornu
Kanem-Bornu. It held the Kaouar oases on the caravan road north to the Fezzan, and after Bulala attacks drove its rulers west around 1380 it became known simply as Bornu.
Q 13Which Fulani scholar declared a jihad in 1804 and founded the Sokoto Caliphate?
Usman Dan Fodio
Usman Dan Fodio launched his jihad in 1804 and built the Sokoto Caliphate across northern Nigeria; the displaced ruling house of Katsina set up a rival court at Maradi in today's Niger.
Q 21President Mamadou Tandja was ousted by Niger's army in 2010 after trying to do what?
Stay in power past his term
Stay in power past his term. In 2009 he dissolved parliament and pushed through a referendum extending his rule, and soldiers captured him after a gun battle in February 2010.
Q 22Which president of Niger was overthrown in the coup of 26 July 2023?
Mohamed Bazoum
Mohamed Bazoum. Elected two years earlier and a Western ally against Islamist militants, he refused to resign and was held in his residence with his wife and son.
Q 23After the 2023 coup, Niger joined Mali and Burkina Faso in forming what?
The Alliance of Sahel States
Q 14Which queen of Lougou fought the French Voulet-Chanoine column in 1899?
Sarraounia
Sarraounia. Reports of the column's massacres led Paris to send a colonel to relieve its two captains; when he caught up with them that July, Voulet had him shot rather than hand over command.
Q 15Under French colonial rule, Niger's governor answered to a governor-general based in which city?
Dakar
Dakar. The Senegalese port ran French West Africa, which took Niger as a full colony only in 1922, once two decades of army rule had worn down Tuareg resistance.
Q 16Niger's currency, the CFA franc, has been pegged since 1999 to which other currency?
Euro
Euro. The CFA franc was tied to the French franc until France adopted the euro, and it lost half its value overnight in January 1994, when France devalued it.
Q 17Nigeriens plant trees every 3 August to mark which national holiday?
Independence Day
Independence Day. Niger left French rule on 3 August 1960, and the holiday doubles as a festival of the tree, when citizens are each meant to plant one to hold back the desert.
Q 18Who was Niger's first president?
Hamani Diori
Hamani Diori. A former schoolteacher who settled disputes between other African states, he fell at home in 1974 to an army coup that killed his wife, and spent years in detention.
Q 19Niger's 2023 coup began when which unit seized the head of state?
The presidential guard
The presidential guard. Its commander, General Abdourahamane Tiani, took power two days later; a Niger newspaper reported that the president had been trying to remove him from the post.
Q 20Colonel Seyni Kountché's 1974 coup toppled Niger's first president after years of which disaster?
Drought
Drought. The Sahel drought of the early 1970s brought food shortages, and ministers were accused of misusing food aid; Kountché, the army chief of staff, then ruled until his death in 1987.
The Alliance of Sahel States. The three juntas signed its charter in September 2023, pledging that an attack on one would be treated as an attack on all, after ECOWAS threatened to invade Niger.
Q 24ECOWAS sanctions after the 2023 coup cut which vital import from Nigeria?
Electricity
Electricity. Nigeria supplied up to 70 percent of Niger's power, so when it cut the line, major cities were left with about an hour of supply followed by up to five hours of blackout.
Q 25Forged documents, exposed as fakes in 2003, claimed which country had tried to buy uranium from Niger?
Iraq
Iraq. President Bush cited the claim in his 2003 State of the Union address, weeks before the invasion; UN nuclear inspectors then reported that the papers were not authentic.
Q 26A 1,950 km pipeline carrying Niger's crude oil to the Atlantic was built by which country's state oil company?
China
China. The China National Petroleum Corporation laid the line from the Agadem desert oilfields to a port in Benin, giving landlocked Niger a way to ship its crude abroad.
Q 27The Tree of Ténéré, once thought the most isolated tree on Earth, was knocked down in 1973 by which vehicle?
A truck
A truck. Its Libyan driver, rumoured to have been drunk, hit it with open desert on every side; the dead trunk now stands in Niger's national museum, and a metal sculpture marks the spot.
Q 28The Tree of Ténéré was what kind of tree?
An acacia
An acacia. It sprouted when the Sahara was less parched and outlived every neighbour because, as a well dug beside it showed, its roots reached water more than 30 m down.
Q 29The historic centre of which Saharan city, seat of a Tuareg sultanate, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site?
Agadez
Agadez. Tuareg tribes settled there within the bounds of their old camps, which still shape its streets, and its 27 m minaret is the tallest structure built entirely of mud brick.
Q 30Niger's far south-eastern Diffa region reaches the shore of which lake?
Lake Chad
Lake Chad. The lake has shrunk so sharply since the 1960s that N'guigmi, once a town on its shore, was left far from the water.