Sao Tome and Principe Trivia
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49 free Sao Tome and Principe trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Forty-two questions on Sao Tome and Principe, Africa's second-smallest country, two volcanic islands in the Gulf of Guinea that were uninhabited until Portuguese sailors landed in 1470. Geography covers the capital, Pico de Sao Tome, the needle of Pico Cao Grande, the equator on Ilheu das Rolas, the Cameroon Line and the world's smallest ibis. History runs from the deported Jewish children and the first water-powered sugar mill, through the slave depot years, Amador's 1595 revolt, the coffee and cocoa roças that made the islands the world's biggest cocoa producer by 1905, the Batepa massacre, Eddington's 1919 eclipse test of relativity, and independence in 1975 under Manuel Pinto da Costa. Culture and modern rounds cover Portuguese and the Forro, Angolar and Principense creoles, the Angolares of the 1540 shipwreck, the dobra pegged to the euro, the flag's two stars, tchiloli, ussua rhythms, the Voice of America relay, the oil zone shared with Nigeria and the whole-country biosphere reserve of 2025. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the country, its islands and history, and the sentence that establishes it is quoted under each explanation. Suits a pub quiz, an African geography lesson or anyone who has ever eaten single-origin chocolate.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Sao Tome and Principe lies in which body of water off Central Africa?
The Gulf of Guinea
The Gulf of Guinea: its seabed may hold large oil reserves, so the islands, long dependent on aid and a single export crop, began selling offshore exploration rights in the late 1990s.
Q 02Sao Tome and Principe is Africa's second-smallest and second-least populous state after which country?
Seychelles
Seychelles alone is smaller in both area and population. Sao Tome and Principe's home market is so tiny that manufacturing has never taken hold, and the country imports most of what it uses, food included.
Q 03Who was living on Sao Tome and Principe when Portuguese explorers arrived around 1470?
Nobody at all
Nobody at all: the islands were empty, so Portugal had to people its new colony from scratch, with unwilling settlers shipped from home and enslaved Africans brought from the mainland.
Q 04Sao Tome's early settlers included about 2,000 of what, deported by the Portuguese crown?
Jewish children
Jewish children: the crown had them taken from their parents, baptised and shipped out to help people the new colony, alongside convicts sent out from Portugal.
Q 05Which crop drove Sao Tome's 16th-century boom, grown on plantations worked by enslaved Africans?
Sugar
Sugar made the island rich for a few decades, until bigger plantations across the Atlantic undercut its poorly dried product and the trade collapsed.
Q 06Amador, the leader of Sao Tome's great slave revolt of 1595, proclaimed himself what?
King
King: Amador's rebels wrecked most of the island's mills and nearly overran the colony before the militia beat them. The Portuguese executed him; today he is honoured as a national hero.
Q 07In the early 1900s Sao Tome was, for a time, the world's largest producer of what?
Cocoa
Cocoa: in 1909 Cadbury and other European chocolate makers stopped buying the islands' beans in protest at the slave-like recruitment of plantation workers from Angola.
Q 08Sao Tome's plantation estates, whose managers held near-total power over their workers, were known as what?
Rocas
Rocas outlived slavery: after abolition in the 1870s the estates carried on with 'contract' workers shipped from Angola, in conditions widely denounced as slavery under another name.
Q 09Which physicist observed the May 1919 solar eclipse from Principe to test general relativity?
Arthur Eddington
Arthur Eddington photographed stars beside the eclipsed Sun through gaps in the cloud; their shifted positions matched Einstein's prediction and made Einstein world-famous.
Q 10What sparked the 1953 Batepa massacre of hundreds of islanders on Sao Tome?
Fears of forced plantation work
Fears of forced plantation work: rumour had it the labour-starved governor would conscript free islanders for the estates. The killings became a rallying cry for independence and are mourned every 3 February.
Q 11How did Sao Tome and Principe win independence from Portugal in 1975?
Negotiated handover
Negotiated handover: the liberation movement was a small band of exiles that never mounted a guerrilla campaign on the islands, so the terms were settled at the conference table.
Q 12Who was Sao Tome and Principe's first president, also credited with designing its flag?
Manuel Pinto da Costa
Manuel Pinto da Costa led the country for its first 16 years, retired, then returned to win the presidency again in 2011 at the age of 74.
Q 13What on Sao Tome and Principe's flag represents its two islands?
Black stars
Q 21What is the currency of Sao Tome and Principe?
The dobra
The dobra replaced the colonial escudo in 1977; years of inflation later forced the central bank to knock three zeros off it, swapping 1,000 old dobras for one new one in 2018.
Q 22Since 2010 Sao Tome and Principe's currency has been pegged to which other currency?
The euro
The euro: Portugal signed a deal in 2009 to support the peg, as it had a decade earlier for another former colony, giving the tiny economy a fixed rate with its main trading partners.
Q 23Which Portuguese-based creole has by far the most speakers in Sao Tome and Principe?
Forro
Forro means 'freed' in Portuguese: the creole grew up among the colony's freed slaves and their descendants.
Black stars: two sit on the yellow band, one for each island. The design was lifted almost unchanged from the independence movement's banner, with only the yellow band widened.
Q 14Sao Tome and Principe was among the first African countries to do what in 1990?
Legalise opposition parties
Legalise opposition parties: a new constitution ended 15 years of one-party rule, and at the free elections of 1991 the governing party lost and handed over power peacefully.
Q 15What is the highest point in Sao Tome and Principe?
Pico de Sao Tome
Pico de Sao Tome rises 2,024 metres; the streams that pour off it in every direction give the island its many waterfalls but no large river.
Q 16Pico Cao Grande, the needle-like landmark of southern Sao Tome, is what kind of formation?
A volcanic plug
A volcanic plug: lava hardened in the throat of an old volcano, then erosion stripped away the softer cone around it and left the core standing as a tower over the rainforest.
Q 17Which line crosses Ilheu das Rolas, an islet off southern Sao Tome?
The Equator
The Equator: a Portuguese survey led by the navigator Gago Coutinho in the 1910s proved that the line crosses the islet, where a monument now lets visitors stand in both hemispheres at once.
Q 18Sao Tome and Principe sit on which volcanic chain, shared with Bioko, Annobon and a famous mainland peak?
The Cameroon Line
The Cameroon Line is a 1,600 km row of volcanoes running from the open Atlantic deep into the mainland; only Mount Cameroon still erupts, while the islands themselves have been quiet for centuries.
Q 19Sao Tome's southern rainforest is the only home of the rare 'dwarf' species of which bird?
Ibis
Ibis: the dwarf ibis feeds on the forest floor and nests in the trees, and it is now among the island's most endangered birds because it is hunted and the old rainforest it depends on keeps shrinking.
Q 20In 2025 Sao Tome and Principe became the first country to lie entirely within what kind of UNESCO site?
A biosphere reserve
A biosphere reserve: Principe, rich in species found nowhere else, earned the status in 2012, and adding the larger island in 2025 put the whole nation inside one.
Q 24The Angolares of Sao Tome are said to descend from Angolan slaves who survived what in the 1540s?
A shipwreck
A shipwreck, in the traditional telling: the survivors struggled ashore on the island's wild south coast and founded a free community of their own, though historians still argue over the story.
Q 25What is the largest religion in Sao Tome and Principe?
Catholicism
Catholicism came with the first Portuguese settlers; five centuries on it is still the majority faith, though many islanders blend its rites with traditional African beliefs.
Q 26The 16th-century Fort Sao Sebastiao, on the harbour of Sao Tome city, was converted to house what?
The National Museum
The National Museum: built to guard the port against pirate raids, the fort now displays religious art and relics of colonial life, while the lighthouse on its walls still guides ships.
Q 27What status has Principe held within Sao Tome and Principe since 1995?
Autonomous region
Autonomous region: parliament voted the remote island self-rule in 1994, and since the following year a regional government in Santo Antonio has run its local affairs.
Q 28What happened to the Portuguese-owned plantations after Sao Tome and Principe became independent in 1975?
They were nationalised
They were nationalised: the estates, covering most of the farmland, became 15 state enterprises, but harvests collapsed and in the 1990s the land was broken up among smallholders.
Q 29In 2001 Sao Tome and Principe agreed to explore for oil jointly with which country?
Nigeria
Nigeria: the two countries' sea claims overlapped, so they pooled the disputed waters rather than argue over the border, though the hoped-for oil boom has yet to arrive.
Q 30Which international broadcaster built a relay station on Sao Tome to reach radio listeners across Africa?
Voice of America
Voice of America chose the island because transmitters there, just off the continent's west coast, can reach much of Africa; the two governments signed a long-term deal for the site in 1992.