South Sudan Trivia
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53 free South Sudan trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
South Sudan is the world's youngest widely recognised country, born on 9 July 2011 after a referendum in which almost 99% voted to leave Sudan. This quiz covers the long road there and everything since: two Sudanese civil wars, the Anyanya and the SPLA, John Garang's helicopter crash, the oil that makes up nine-tenths of state revenue, the war between Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, and the country's pivot toward East Africa. Easy questions ask for the capital, the river, the year of independence and the continent's newest UN member; the hard ones want the names once considered for the new state, the meaning of 'Anyanya', the town where Britain and France nearly went to war in 1898, the planned capital that never got built and the world's largest land-mammal migration. There is also the Sudd swamp, the Dinka and Nuer, Juba Arabic, Manute Bol, Luol Deng, the Bright Stars' run to the Paris Olympics and a national anthem that ends in 'Oyee!'. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the country, its history, its people and its wildlife, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 53 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country became Africa's largest by area when South Sudan seceded?
Algeria
Algeria is more than four-fifths Sahara by area, which is why most Algerians live in its fertile north along the Mediterranean coast.
Q 02Which actor launched a satellite watch on Sudan before the 2011 referendum?
George Clooney
George Clooney's project hired private satellites and published images within a day, which he called being 'antigenocide paparazzi' so leaders would know they were watched.
Q 03Which supermodel fled the war in what is now South Sudan as a child refugee?
Alek Wek
Alek Wek was stopped by a model scout at a market in Crystal Palace, and the chance meeting launched her career.
Q 04South Sudan's capital stands on the banks of which river?
The White Nile
The White Nile makes the capital a river port, from which barges travel downstream toward Bor and Renk.
Q 05What is the Sudd?
A vast swamp
A vast swamp, the Sudd takes its name from the Arabic for 'obstruction', because its floating mats of vegetation block boats on the Nile.
Q 06Which country borders South Sudan to the east?
Ethiopia
Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, hosted the talks that produced the 1972 peace agreement ending Sudan's first civil war.
Q 07Which country resettled thousands of Sudan's 'Lost Boys', who had fled the civil war as children, in 2001?
United States
The United States stepped in because conditions in the overcrowded refugee camps where the boys had spent years had become unsustainable.
Q 08Whose South Sudan peacekeepers got their first mandate to use force since WWII?
Japan
Japan withdrew its troops in 2017, and Defence Minister Tomomi Inada resigned after her ministry was found to have misled lawmakers about the mission.
Q 09Which southern rebel leader died in a helicopter crash in 2005, weeks after becoming Sudan's First Vice-President?
John Garang
John Garang's death set off three days of riots in Khartoum, where many southerners suspected the crash was no accident.
Q 10South Sudan's Mundari cattle herders tint their hair orange by rinsing it in what?
Cow urine
Cow urine also serves the Mundari as a wash for hands and faces, because herders treat it as a natural antiseptic.
Q 11South Sudan's civil war of December 2013 began as a power struggle between the president and which ex-deputy?
Riek Machar
Riek Machar, whom the president accused of plotting a coup, returned to government as a vice-president under a 2018 power-sharing deal.
Q 12Part of what is now South Sudan was once leased, for his lifetime only, to which European king?
Leopold II of Belgium
Leopold II of Belgium's Congo Free State troops seized the land from Mahdist forces in 1897, and it passed to British-run Sudan after he died.
Q 13In 1898 Britain and France nearly went to war over which spot in what is now South Sudan?
Fashoda
Q 21As of 2025, South Sudan was among the last few countries where which parasitic disease still infected people?
Guinea worm
Guinea worm has no vaccine or cure, yet filtering drinking water helped cut cases from about 3.5 million in the mid-1980s to about a dozen a year.
Q 22South Sudan's three historic regions are Bahr el Ghazal, Greater Upper Nile and which other?
Equatoria
Equatoria's governor Emin Pasha, cut off by war, had no wish to leave when Henry Morton Stanley's expedition arrived to rescue him in 1888.
Q 23In 2016 South Sudan became a full member of which regional bloc?
The East African Community
At Fashoda the French, outnumbered ten to one, were ordered to withdraw, and war was averted.
Q 14Which general governed Sudan's far south in the 1870s, before dying at Khartoum?
Charles George Gordon
Charles George Gordon refused the governor's £10,000 salary, saying £2,000 a year was enough, and spent his term fighting the slave trade.
Q 15Sudan was governed from 1899 to 1956 as a 'condominium' shared by Britain and which other country?
Egypt
Egypt's 1952 revolution brought in leaders who made Sudanese independence a priority, so the joint rule ended within four years.
Q 16Which is the largest ethnic group in South Sudan?
Dinka
The Dinka seal a marriage with bride-wealth paid in cattle, so a young man without a herd often has to put off marrying for years.
Q 17The Jonglei Canal was dug to save water lost to what?
Evaporation
Evaporation and plants in the wetlands take about half the water, so the canal was meant to carry it straight past and send more north for farming.
Q 18Which faith do most South Sudanese follow, by 2020 estimates?
Christianity
Christianity spread as colonial rulers favoured missionaries, who built most of the south's schools, while nearly a third follow traditional faiths.
Q 19Which oil-rich border region's referendum on joining Sudan or South Sudan never officially happened?
Abyei
Abyei staged its own unofficial referendum in 2013 and voted almost unanimously to join South Sudan, but neither government recognised the result.
Q 20Sudan, captured as a calf in what is now South Sudan, was the last known male of which rhino?
Northern white rhino
The northern white rhino Sudan was given a Tinder profile in 2017 to raise money for rhino IVF, and died in 2018 leaving only two females.
The East African Community let South Sudan in only after a five-year wait: it had applied as soon as it became independent, but its instability held the bid up.
Q 24A 2023 survey found South Sudan's Boma and Badingilo parks host the world's largest what?
Land mammal migration
At about six million antelope, this land mammal migration is more than double the Serengeti's famous wildebeest migration.
Q 25Which antelope is the most numerous in South Sudan?
White-eared kob
The white-eared kob came through decades of war about five million strong.
Q 26What does the blue triangle on South Sudan's flag contain?
A yellow star
A yellow star sits on a triangle that must be light blue, not deep blue, South Sudan's media regulator warned printers in 2023.
Q 27Which large wading bird, one of whose main strongholds is South Sudan, often hunts lungfish?
Shoebill
The shoebill is usually silent, but at the nest it clatters its bill and can let out a cattle-like moo.
Q 28What is the currency of South Sudan?
Pound
The South Sudanese pound arrived days after independence, and Sudan answered within a week with new notes of its own, which the south called 'economic war'.
Q 29Which word follows 'South Sudan' in the title of the country's national anthem?
Oyee!
'South Sudan Oyee!', roughly 'Hurrah!', won a televised contest under the working title 'Land of Cush', a biblical name later cut from the lyrics.
Q 30Which center, born in what is now South Sudan, was one of the two tallest players in NBA history?
Manute Bol
Manute Bol's official papers from Sudan listed him as five feet two, and he explained that officials had measured him sitting down.