Tanzania Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Tanzania trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Tanzania has Africa's highest mountain, its deepest lake, its greatest wildlife migration and the gorge where the human story was dug up, and this quiz covers all of it: the Haya smiths who forged steel 1,500 years ago, the Swahili city-state of Kilwa, Zanzibar's sultans and slave markets, German East Africa and the Maji Maji rebellion, Tanganyika under Britain, Julius Nyerere and Ujamaa, the 1964 union with Zanzibar and the country's first female president. Easy questions ask for the mountain, the largest city, the national language and the ocean; the harder ones want the man who invented the name 'Tanzania', the war that lasted under 45 minutes, the newspaper contest, the two Nobel and rock legends born in Zanzibar, the gem found nowhere else on Earth, the railway China built to Zambia and the anthem shared with South Africa. There is also the Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Gombe's chimpanzees, bongo flava, Tingatinga painting and Kalambo Falls. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the country, its regions and its history, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Tanzania's coastline lies on which ocean?
Indian
Tanzania's 1,424 km coastline faces the Indian Ocean, with Zanzibar, Pemba and Mafia islands offshore. Gulf and Indian traders have sailed here on the monsoon winds since the first millennium.
Q 02Which mountain in Tanzania is the highest in Africa and the tallest free-standing mountain in the world?
Kilimanjaro
Kilimanjaro's Uhuru Peak stands 5,895 metres above sea level, making it Africa's highest point and the tallest free-standing mountain on Earth.
Q 03What is Tanzania's official capital, moved from the coast by a 1974 decision?
Dodoma
Dodoma, in Tanzania's central highlands, became the seat of the National Assembly in 1996; its name comes from a Gogo word meaning 'it has sunk'.
Q 04Who led Tanganyika to independence and served as Tanzania's president until 1985?
Julius Nyerere
Julius Nyerere, called Mwalimu ('teacher'), founded TANU in 1954, became prime minister at independence and president in 1962, retiring in 1985.
Q 05In which year did Tanganyika gain independence from Britain?
1961
Tanganyika became independent from Britain on 9 December 1961; Zanzibar followed in December 1963, and the two united on 26 April 1964 after the Zanzibar Revolution.
Q 06The 1967 Arusha Declaration committed Tanzania to an African socialism known by what name?
Ujamaa
Ujamaa, roughly 'familyhood', was the Arusha Declaration's African socialism: collective villages, nationalised banks and industries. The economy had sagged badly by the late 1970s.
Q 07Which European power ruled mainland Tanzania as a colony from 1885 until World War I?
Germany
Germany ruled the mainland as German East Africa until its defeat in World War I; Britain then administered it as Tanganyika under a League of Nations mandate from 1922.
Q 08Which 1905-07 uprising against colonial rule swept southern Tanzania?
The Maji Maji Rebellion
The Maji Maji Rebellion spread across the south in 1905; fighters believed sacred water, maji, would turn bullets to water. Reprisals and famine killed at least 75,000 people.
Q 09The 1896 war between Britain and the island sultanate off Tanzania is remembered as what?
The shortest war in history
The Anglo-Zanzibar War is the shortest war in history, lasting roughly 38 to 45 minutes on 27 August 1896; British warships shelled the palace after Khalid bin Barghash seized the throne.
Q 10Which rock star was born Farrokh Bulsara in Stone Town, on the island off Tanzania's coast, in 1946?
Freddie Mercury
Freddie Mercury, Queen's frontman, was born Farrokh Bulsara on 5 September 1946 in Stone Town; his Parsi family fled to England after the 1964 revolution.
Q 11Which Tanzanian-born novelist won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature?
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in Zanzibar in 1948 and author of 'Paradise' and 'By the Sea', won the 2021 Nobel for his writing on colonialism and the fate of refugees.
Q 12Tanzania is home to the world's largest population of which animal?
Lions
Tanzania is home to more lions than any other country, an estimated 14,000 or more, concentrated in the Serengeti, Ruaha and Selous ecosystems.
Q 13Which animals star in the great annual migration across the Serengeti plain?
Wildebeest and zebra
Over a million wildebeest and some 200,000 zebra circle the Serengeti ecosystem each year, following the rains; river crossings of the Grumeti and Mara are the dramatic highlights.
Q 21In 1978-79 Tanzania fought a war that ended with the overthrow of which neighbouring dictator?
Idi Amin of Uganda
Amin had invaded first. Tanzanian troops and Ugandan exiles took Kampala, but the war badly damaged Tanzania's economy.
Q 22Who became Tanzania's first female president in March 2021?
Samia Suluhu Hassan
Samia Suluhu Hassan, born in Zanzibar in 1960, was sworn in on 19 March 2021 after her predecessor died in office, having been vice president since 2015.
Q 23Which party was formed in 1977 by merging TANU with Zanzibar's Afro-Shirazi Party?
Chama Cha Mapinduzi
Q 14In which Tanzanian park did Jane Goodall begin her study of chimpanzees in 1960?
Gombe Stream
Jane Goodall arrived at Gombe Stream, in western Tanzania, in July 1960; her observation of chimpanzees making tools upended assumptions about what separated humans from other animals.
Q 15The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is named after what kind of geological feature?
A volcanic caldera
The Ngorongoro Crater is a volcanic caldera, the world's largest intact and unflooded one, about 19 km across and 600 m deep; its floor teems with wildlife year-round.
Q 16Olduvai Gorge, famous for early hominid fossils, is a ravine in which vast geological feature?
The Rift Valley
Olduvai Gorge is a 48 km ravine cut into the Great Rift Valley's eastern branch on the Serengeti plains; Louis and Mary Leakey excavated hominid fossils there for decades.
Q 17Tanzanite, the blue-violet gemstone, is mined only in one tiny area of Manyara Region near what?
The Mererani Hills
The Mererani Hills near Arusha hold the only known tanzanite deposit, roughly 7 km by 2 km; vanadium gives the blue-violet colour and Tiffany named the stone in 1968.
Q 18On Tanzania's flag, a gold-edged black band separates a green triangle from one of what colour?
Light blue
Adopted in 1964, the flag pairs Tanganyika's green-black-green with the light blue of Zanzibar's flag, standing for the ocean; the gold edges represent mineral wealth.
Q 19Tanzania's national anthem 'Mungu Ibariki Afrika' is a local-language version of which pan-African hymn?
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, written by Enoch Sontonga in Xhosa in 1897, became a pan-African liberation hymn; it also forms part of South Africa's anthem and supplies Zambia's tune.
Q 20Which country financed and built the TAZARA railway from Tanzania to Zambia in the 1970s?
China
China financed and built the 1,860 km TAZARA line between 1970 and 1975, giving landlocked Zambia a route to the sea that bypassed white-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa.
Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the 'Party of the Revolution', was created on 5 February 1977, and it governed as the sole legal party until multi-party politics was legalised in 1992.
Q 24More than 1,500 years ago the Haya people of the Lake Victoria shore built furnaces that forged what?
Carbon steel
The Haya smelted carbon steel in tall charcoal furnaces roughly 2,000 years ago, using preheated air blown through clay tuyeres; archaeologists reported temperatures above 1,800 °C.
Q 25Which medieval Swahili city-state on Tanzania's coast grew rich on the gold trade from Sofala?
Kilwa
Kilwa Kisiwani, an island city-state on the southern coast, minted its own coins, controlled the Sofala gold trade and dominated the Swahili coast until the Portuguese sacked it in 1505.
Q 26The sultan of which country moved his capital to the clove island off Tanzania in 1840?
Oman
Said bin Sultan, ruler of Oman, shifted his court from Muscat to Zanzibar in 1840, making the clove island the hub of the East African ivory and slave trade.
Q 27Following Songwe's creation in 2016, how many regions did Tanzania have, five of them island regions?
31
Tanzania had 31 regions from 2016: 26 on the mainland and five on Zanzibar and Pemba, which keep their own president, House of Representatives and Revolutionary Council.
Q 28Tanzania is the most populous African country located entirely where?
South of the equator
Tanzania lies entirely south of the equator, between about 1°S and 12°S; with roughly 67 million people in 2024 it had outgrown South Africa, the next-largest wholly southern-hemisphere country.
Q 29Which of Africa's Great Lakes on Tanzania's border is the continent's deepest?
Lake Tanganyika
Lake Tanganyika reaches 1,470 metres deep, Africa's deepest and the world's second-deepest lake after Baikal; it holds hundreds of endemic cichlid fish species.
Q 30Which Tanzanian soda lake is East Africa's only regular breeding site for lesser flamingos?
Lake Natron
Lake Natron, a caustic soda lake below Ol Doinyo Lengai, is the only regular breeding ground of East Africa's lesser flamingos; its high alkalinity keeps predators away from the nests.