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40 free South African History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
South Africa's past reads like several countries' histories stacked on top of each other: a medieval gold-trading kingdom on the Limpopo, a Dutch refreshment station that grew into a colony, Zulu regiments facing British redcoats, Boer trekkers, and the mineral rushes that built Johannesburg and bankrolled an empire. These 40 questions follow that story from the Khoisan herders and the first Portuguese sails to the Great Trek, the Boer Wars, the 1910 Union and the long apartheid decades, then on to Sharpeville, Soweto, the negotiations, the first all-race election and the Rugby World Cup that followed. Every answer carries a short explanation and a cited source. It suits pub quiz setters, teachers building a history round, matric students revising, and anyone who wants to test what they really know beyond the headline names.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Vasco da Gama named the coast of today's KwaZulu-Natal 'Natal' after sighting it on which day in 1497?
Christmas Day
Christmas Day gave the region its name, since Natal refers in Portuguese to the birth of Christ. Vasco da Gama saw the coast on 25 December 1497 on his way to India, and the provincial coat of arms later carried a Star of Bethlehem.
Q 02South Africa's longest river was named in 1779 by Robert Gordon, a VOC garrison commander, after which royal dynasty?
The House of Orange
The House of Orange, the Dutch ruling family, was honoured by Gordon on a trip into the interior from Cape Town. At 2,432 km the Orange River is the longest in the country and feeds irrigation and hydroelectric schemes.
Q 03Mandela cast his 1994 vote at Ohlange school, founded in 1901, to lay a wreath on which first ANC president's grave?
John Dube
John Dube founded Ohlange with his wife Nokutela as the Zulu Christian Industrial School and is buried in its grounds. Mandela picked the school deliberately so that his first vote honoured the man who first led the movement.
Q 04Which future British prime minister, captured as a war correspondent in 1899, escaped a Boer prison camp in Pretoria?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill was covering the war for the Morning Post when Boer shelling derailed his armoured train at Chieveley. That December he slipped out, hid in a mine and stowed away on freight trains, and the escape attracted much publicity.
Q 05Women who marched on Pretoria against pass laws in 1956 sang that to strike a woman is to strike what?
A rock
A rock, the marchers sang, is what the government had struck, and the line became the slogan of women's resistance. Some 20,000 women delivered anti-pass petitions to the Union Buildings on 9 August 1956, now National Women's Day.
Q 06A teenage prophetess's 1856 visions led the Xhosa to kill what, expecting the dead to rise and expel the settlers?
Their cattle
Their cattle, the source of Xhosa wealth and food, were slaughtered on the word of 15-year-old Nongqawuse, and crops were destroyed too. The famine that followed in 1856–57 devastated Xhosaland on the eastern frontier.
Q 07The 1948 election that brought the National Party and apartheid to power was won despite the party doing what?
Winning fewer votes than its rival
Winning fewer votes than its rival did not stop Daniel Malan's Nationalists: the United Party polled well over a tenth more votes, but first-past-the-post and over-weighted rural seats handed the Nationalists a majority of seats.
Q 08In 1893 a young Mohandas Gandhi was thrown off a train for refusing to leave a first-class carriage at which station?
Pietermaritzburg
Pietermaritzburg's station is where Gandhi sat shivering all night, weighing whether to go home to India or protest for his rights; he chose to protest, boarded the next day, and stayed in South Africa for 21 years.
Q 09At the 1838 Battle of Blood River, 464 Voortrekkers held off thousands of Zulu from inside what defensive formation?
A wagon laager
A wagon laager, ox wagons drawn into a closed ring, let the trekkers fire from cover at attackers who could not reach them; they had drilled the tactic every evening on the march. The date, 16 December, became sacred to Afrikaners.
Q 10Mandela presented the 1995 Rugby World Cup in a Springbok shirt carrying which number, the same as the captain's?
6
6 was the number on the shirt and cap Mandela wore to hand the Webb Ellis Cup to Pienaar, a scene later ranked 70th in a British television list of the greatest sports moments. The Springboks had beaten New Zealand 15–12 after extra time.
Q 11Which animal, made of wood covered in gold foil, is the most famous artefact from the medieval kingdom of Mapungubwe?
A rhinoceros
A rhinoceros of gold foil over wood lay in a royal grave on Mapungubwe Hill, near where the Shashe meets the Limpopo. The kingdom exported gold and ivory to the east coast in exchange for glass beads, cloth and glazed ceramics.
Q 12At which 1879 battle did a Zulu army wipe out a British column, the army's worst defeat by an indigenous foe?
Isandlwana
Isandlwana, on 22 January 1879, saw some 20,000 Zulu warriors overrun about 1,800 British, colonial and native troops less than two weeks into the invasion of Zululand. Britain had to rebuild its force before taking Ulundi in July.
Q 13The 16 June anniversary of the 1976 Soweto uprising, which began as a school protest, is marked by which public holiday?
Q 21The First Boer War ended with a Boer victory on which summit in February 1881, among Britain's most humiliating defeats?
Majuba Hill
Majuba Hill was occupied overnight by General Colley's 405 men, who were then picked off by Boer marksmen climbing unseen through dead ground; Colley himself was killed. The British lost 285 men killed, captured or wounded.
Q 22Which British campaigner exposed conditions in the Boer War concentration camps where thousands of Boer civilians died?
Emily Hobhouse
Emily Hobhouse, a Cornish welfare campaigner, knew nothing of the camps when she sailed for South Africa, then toured them with a single truck of supplies. Her report shamed the government into sending a commission under Millicent Fawcett.
Q 23Which Boer general who fought Britain in 1899–1902 became the first prime minister of the Union of South Africa in 1910?
Youth Day
Youth Day remembers the schoolchildren who marched against the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974, which forced black schools to teach half their subjects in Afrikaans. Internationally the same date is the Day of the African Child.
Q 14Which neighbour, run by South Africa as South West Africa from 1915, finally became independent in March 1990?
Namibia
Namibia was a German colony seized by South African troops in 1915, then held as a League of Nations mandate that Pretoria refused to give up for decades. The United Nations had renamed the territory in 1968.
Q 15What could the Truth and Reconciliation Commission grant someone who fully disclosed a politically motivated crime?
Amnesty from prosecution
Amnesty from prosecution, civil as well as criminal, was the commission's trade for truth: applicants had to show their acts were political and proportionate and hold nothing back. The first hearing was televised live on 15 April 1996.
Q 16Besides resentment of British rule, which 1834 decision across the empire helped push Boer families onto the Great Trek?
The abolition of slavery
The abolition of slavery across British colonies in 1834 was felt as a blow by slave-owning Boers, who also resented anglicisation. Organised trek parties began crossing the Vaal in January 1836 to find land beyond British reach.
Q 17Which Zulu king had Voortrekker leader Piet Retief and his party put to death in February 1838 after a land treaty?
Dingane
Dingane, who took the throne after the assassination of his half-brother Shaka in 1828, killed Retief's delegation at his royal kraal after signing over land, then sent regiments against the trekker camps near Weenen.
Q 18From 1860, about 200,000 indentured labourers from India were shipped to Natal mainly to work on which crop?
Sugar cane
Sugar cane plantations on the humid Natal coast took the first shiploads, and later arrivals went to coal mines and railways. Their descendants make Durban one of the largest ethnically Indian cities outside India.
Q 19How many Victoria Crosses were awarded for the defence of Rorke's Drift in 1879, a record for a single action?
Eleven
Eleven Victoria Crosses went to a garrison of just over 150 British and colonial troops who held the mission station against 3,000 to 4,000 Zulu warriors. The 1964 film Zulu dramatised the stand for a new generation.
Q 20Which Zulu king, deposed after the British burned his capital Ulundi in 1879, was exiled to Cape Town and then London?
Cetshwayo
Cetshwayo had opposed the war and tried in vain to make peace, and his dignified bearing in London won him public sympathy. In 1883 Britain tried to restore him to part of Zululand, but the attempt failed.
Louis Botha
Louis Botha had commanded Boer forces against the British, yet within eight years of the peace he led the new dominion and sent troops to seize German South West Africa in the First World War. He died in office in 1919.
Q 24In which year was the African National Congress founded in Bloemfontein, as the South African Native National Congress?
1912
1912 makes the ANC older than most of the governments it later faced: it was founded on 8 January to defend black rights after the Union excluded them, and took its present name in 1923. It would not hold power for another 82 years.
Q 25The Natives Land Act of 1913 initially confined black land ownership in the Union to roughly what share of the country?
7%
7% of the land was reserved for the black majority, a share later raised to 13%, leaving most people able to live legally on only a sliver of the country. Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa recorded families evicted from white farms.
Q 26Which South African prime minister helped draft the preamble to the United Nations Charter in San Francisco in 1945?
Jan Smuts
Jan Smuts, a Boer general turned British field marshal, was the only signatory of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles to also sign the UN Charter. He lost power three years later to the party that built apartheid.
Q 27The 1922 Rand Rebellion on the Witwatersrand gold mines was an armed uprising by which group of workers?
White mineworkers
White mineworkers rose up when mine owners, hit by a falling gold price, moved to put cheaper black labour into skilled jobs; strikers formed armed units and fought police and troops in March 1922. The revolt was crushed within days.
Q 28The anti-pass campaign that ended in the Sharpeville shootings of 21 March 1960 was organised by which breakaway party?
Pan Africanist Congress
Pan Africanist Congress founder Robert Sobukwe urged people to leave their passes at home and present themselves for arrest, and about 5,000 gathered at the Sharpeville police station. Sobukwe led his own march in Soweto.
Q 29The 1977 Gleneagles Agreement committed Commonwealth governments to discourage what with apartheid South Africa?
Sporting contact
Sporting contact was the target because rugby and cricket tours mattered so much to white South Africa; the leaders signed at a Scottish hotel in Perthshire, reinforcing their 1971 Singapore Declaration against racism.
Q 30Which coalition of hundreds of civic, church and union groups was launched in 1983 to oppose the tricameral parliament?
United Democratic Front
United Democratic Front activists rallied under the slogan 'UDF Unites, Apartheid Divides' against a constitution that gave Coloured and Indian voters token chambers while excluding black people. It dissolved in 1991 once the ANC was legal.