Nigerian History Trivia
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38 free Nigerian History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Nigeria's past is a run of turning points: ancient sculptors on the Jos Plateau, a caliphate built by a scholar's jihad, a treaty signed under the guns of a British warship, and a country stitched together by a colonial governor in 1914. Then came independence, a bitter civil war, decades of generals and a return to the ballot box in 1999. These 38 questions cover the kingdoms and empires of the pre-colonial era, the slave trade and the missionaries, the protectorates and the nationalists who argued their way to self-rule, the First Republic and the coups that ended it, the secession of the east, the oil boom, the new capital, the long military years and the presidents of the Fourth Republic. Writers who chronicled all of it get their turn too. Every answer is verified against a primary or encyclopaedic source and comes with a short explanation. It suits students, quiz hosts and anyone who wants to understand how Africa's most populous country came to be.
30 of 38 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Nigeria's defence ministry ordered 16 million tonnes of which material in 1974–75, jamming the Port of Lagos for a year?
Cement
Cement arrived in such volume that half the world's supply steered toward Lagos, far beyond what the port could unload. The ministry needed under three million tonnes for its own projects.
Q 02The Nok culture, first unearthed in a Kaduna State tin mine in 1928, is famed for figures made of which material?
Terracotta
Terracotta figures from Nok are the earliest known large-scale sculptures in sub-Saharan Africa. The first one surfaced 24 feet down in an alluvial tin mine.
Q 03Which novelist twice refused Nigeria's Commander of the Federal Republic honour, in 2004 and again in 2011?
Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe said the reasons for rejecting the offer when it was first made had not been addressed, let alone solved. He had served Biafra as a roving ambassador during the civil war.
Q 04Which Ogoni writer's 1995 hanging with eight others got Nigeria suspended from the Commonwealth?
Ken Saro-Wiwa
Ken Saro-Wiwa had led a peaceful campaign against oil companies' pollution of Ogoni land before a special military tribunal condemned him. The Commonwealth suspension lasted more than three years.
Q 05Which military governor of the Eastern Region declared the Republic of Biafra on 30 May 1967?
Odumegwu Ojukwu
Odumegwu Ojukwu declared independence after an official vote of secession in the Eastern Region, months after peace talks collapsed. He handed over to his second in command in January 1970 and flew into exile.
Q 06Which former transport minister was found drugged in a crate at Stansted Airport in 1984, bound for Lagos?
Umaru Dikko
Umaru Dikko's crate was bound for Lagos as diplomatic baggage but lacked the required markings, so customs opened it. The kidnap attempt soured Nigeria's relations with Britain for years.
Q 07Despite their name, most Benin Bronzes looted in the 1897 British expedition are cast from which metal?
Brass
Brass of variable composition, an alloy of copper, zinc and lead, makes up most of the pieces, like most West African 'bronzes'. Thousands were carried off as Britain consolidated control of Southern Nigeria.
Q 08Which former military ruler won the 2015 election, the first time a sitting Nigerian president lost a re-election bid?
Muhammadu Buhari
Muhammadu Buhari had ruled as a military head of state from 1983 to 1985 before winning at the ballot box on his fourth attempt. The incumbent conceded on 31 March 2015.
Q 09Which vice-president became acting president in February 2010 through a Senate 'doctrine of necessity'?
Goodluck Jonathan
Goodluck Jonathan stepped up because the president had left for medical treatment in Saudi Arabia in November 2009. He won a full term in 2011 and conceded defeat on 31 March 2015.
Q 10Which playwright spent 22 months in prison during the civil war, later recounted in 'The Man Died'?
Wole Soyinka
Wole Soyinka was declared a traitor and arrested after secretly meeting the Eastern Region's governor to try to avert the war. The notes he kept in his cell became the memoir.
Q 11Whose 2006 novel 'Half of a Yellow Sun', set in the Biafran war, won the 2007 Women's Prize for Fiction?
Chimamanda Adichie
Chimamanda Adichie took the title from the half sun on the Biafran flag; the book was only her second novel.
Q 12Which founder of the West African Pilot newspaper became Nigeria's first President in the 1963 republic?
Nnamdi Azikiwe
Nnamdi Azikiwe founded the paper in Lagos in 1937 to promote nationalism, then served as the first indigenous Governor-General before the republic. The presidency was largely ceremonial beside a prime minister.
Q 13Which general took power in a November 1993 coup and ruled until his sudden death at Aso Rock in June 1998?
Sani Abacha
Q 21Which military president moved the seat of government from Lagos to Abuja on 12 December 1991?
Ibrahim Babangida
Ibrahim Babangida styled himself 'president' rather than head of state through eight years of military rule, and launched the Structural Adjustment Programme in 1986. He stepped aside in August 1993.
Q 22The January 1967 Aburi Accord, a failed attempt to keep Nigeria from civil war, was negotiated in which country?
Ghana
Ghana's military leader, General Ankrah, chaired the talks at Aburi between the federal side and the Eastern Region's delegates. The accord broke down over rival interpretations, and war followed that July.
Q 23Which Kanem-Bornu ruler of around 1570–1603 bought muskets and hired Turkish advisers to train his gunmen?
Sani Abacha's family is alleged to have embezzled between $2 billion and $5 billion, money still being traced and returned decades later. His death opened the door to the 1999 handover.
Q 14Which presumed winner of Nigeria's annulled 1993 election died in military custody on the day of his scheduled release?
Moshood Abiola
Moshood Abiola had declared himself the lawful president in Lagos in June 1994 and was jailed for it; he died on 7 July 1998, weeks after the general who held him. The vote he won is now marked as Democracy Day.
Q 15Which regional bloc was founded by the Treaty of Lagos on 28 May 1975 and now sits in Abuja?
ECOWAS
ECOWAS was signed into being in Lagos by fifteen West African states, and from 1990 sent a joint military force, ECOMOG, to intervene in Liberia's civil war.
Q 16Nigeria Regiment battalions of the 81st West Africa Division fought the Japanese in which country's Arakan region?
Burma
Burma's Kaladan Valley was the division's ground in the second Arakan campaign from February to May 1944, covering the flank of XV Indian Corps. The 82nd West Africa Division followed it there.
Q 17The Kanem-Bornu Empire, whose rulers held the title mai for centuries, was based around which body of water?
Lake Chad
Lake Chad's shores anchored an empire that grew rich on trans-Saharan trade and reached into today's Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, Libya and Chad.
Q 18Shell D'Arcy struck Nigeria's first commercial oil in January 1956 at which village in present-day Bayelsa State?
Oloibiri
Oloibiri's strike ended nearly fifty years of fruitless searching for oil in Nigeria, and the field began producing in 1958 at about 5,100 barrels a day.
Q 19Which Japanese architect designed the monumental core and business district of Nigeria's new capital, Abuja?
Kenzo Tange
Kenzo Tange detailed the centre of a capital sited in the middle of the country, on land seen as neutral between Nigeria's main ethnic groups. Abuja replaced Lagos on 12 December 1991.
Q 20Which head of state, assassinated in a failed 1976 coup, gives his name to Lagos's international airport?
Murtala Muhammed
Murtala Muhammed ruled from 29 July 1975 until soldiers in Lt. Col. Bukar Suka Dimka's abortive coup shot him in his car in Lagos on 13 February 1976. Days earlier his government had decreed the capital's move to Abuja.
Idris Alooma
Idris Alooma's wars are known in unusual detail because his chief imam, Ahmad ibn Fartuwa, wrote two chronicles of them in Arabic.
Q 24Which Oba of Benin was deposed and exiled after a British expedition sacked his capital in February 1897?
Ovonramwen
Ovonramwen, the thirty-fifth Oba, was sent to Calabar in September 1897, never allowed home, and died there in January 1914. His palace's looted art ended up in museums across Europe.
Q 25The Oyo Empire's ruler bore which title, checked by an Oyo Mesi council that could compel him to commit suicide?
Alaafin
Alaafin was the title, and when the Oyo Mesi rejected a ruler its head, the Bashorun, presented him with an empty calabash or a dish of parrot's eggs as the signal to take his own life.
Q 26Which businessman built the Royal Niger Company, which sold its territories to Britain for £865,000 in 1900?
George Goldie
George Goldie merged the rival British traders on the Niger into a single firm in 1879, then won it a royal charter in 1886 to govern the region as well as trade there.
Q 27Which Lagos engineer, called the father of Nigerian nationalism, founded the country's first political party in 1923?
Herbert Macaulay
Herbert Macaulay's Nigerian National Democratic Party was founded on 24 June 1923 to contest the new elected Lagos seats on the Legislative Council, and won them all.
Q 28Which Premier of the Northern Region, titled Sardauna of Sokoto, was assassinated in the coup of 15 January 1966?
Ahmadu Bello
Ahmadu Bello chose to stay on as the North's premier and let his party deputy, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, become federal prime minister. Both were killed in the January 1966 coup.
Q 29Which Western Region premier introduced free primary education and set up Africa's first television service in 1959?
Obafemi Awolowo
Obafemi Awolowo, leader of the Action Group, also gave the region free health care for children. He was later jailed for treason in 1963 and freed by the military in 1966.
Q 30Which 1984 military-government campaign ordered Nigerians to queue at bus stops and arrive at work on time?
War Against Indiscipline
War Against Indiscipline was announced in March 1984 by Tunde Idiagbon, the Chief of Staff at Supreme Headquarters, and ran until September 1985. Its work-ethic phase opened on May Day to tackle lateness and truancy.