West African Kingdoms
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50 free West African Kingdoms trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Long before European ships reached the shore, West Africa was home to some of the richest states in the medieval world. Ghana, Mali and Songhai rose one after another on the southern edge of the Sahara, growing powerful on the caravan trade that crossed the desert, while forest kingdoms such as Benin, Oyo and Ashanti built courts famous for their metalwork, cavalry and royal ceremony. This quiz covers the rulers, cities, trade goods, legends and artworks that students meet when they study the region: who founded each empire, what made it wealthy, how it was governed and why it fell. Every question comes with a short explanation, so it works as a review sheet as well as a game. It suits a class unit on African history, a study session before a test, or anyone curious about a part of the past that deserves to be better known. Play it on screen or print the questions with their answers.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which emperor of Mali gave away so much gold in Cairo on his 1324 pilgrimage that its value fell?
Mansa Musa
Mansa Musa is often called the richest person in history, though historians say his wealth is impossible to calculate. He travelled to Mecca with a vast entourage and is said to have given gold to the poor along the route.
Q 02Which desert-edge city with the Sankoré mosque became a famed centre of Islamic scholarship?
Timbuktu
Timbuktu was a world centre of Islamic learning from the 13th to the 17th century, yet English dictionaries now list its name as a metaphor for any faraway place.
Q 03Which mineral, cut into slabs at Taghaza in the Sahara, did desert caravans carry south to barter for gold?
Salt
Salt was so plentiful at Taghaza that the miners' own houses were built from slabs of it, yet so scarce in the gold country to the south that it was carried there over huge distances.
Q 04In Ashanti legend, which royal object did the priest Okomfo Anokye call down from the sky?
A golden stool
A golden stool is said to house the spirit of the whole Ashanti nation, living, dead and yet to be born. It must never touch the ground, so it rests on a blanket of its own.
Q 05Which rice dish takes its name from the Wolof people, whose medieval empire ruled much of Senegambia?
Jollof
Jollof is now cooked right across West Africa, where a friendly rivalry over which country makes it best has become known as the Jollof wars.
Q 06Which British colony took the name of the medieval Ghana Empire when it became independent in 1957?
Gold Coast
Gold Coast took its new name under Kwame Nkrumah, even though the medieval empire had lain far to the north-west, entirely outside the new country's borders.
Q 07Which British coin, first struck in 1663, was named after the part of West Africa that supplied its gold?
Guinea
Guinea coins made with gold shipped by the Royal African Company carried a tiny elephant, the company's emblem, beneath the monarch's head.
Q 08Which hereditary West African storytellers memorised the histories of kings and passed them on aloud?
Griots
Griots traditionally married only into other families of their kind, so the craft of memorising and performing history stayed in the same bloodlines for centuries.
Q 09Which trickster of Ashanti folk tales, usually pictured as a spider, lives on in the stories of Jamaica?
Anansi
Anansi takes his name from the Akan word for spider, and his tales reached the Caribbean with Ashanti people who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas.
Q 10Which founder of the Mali Empire, unable to walk as a boy in legend, is the hero of a famous oral epic?
Sundiata Keita
Sundiata Keita is remembered as the Lion of Mali because his name joins his mother's name, Sogolon, to the word for lion. He won his empire at the Battle of Kirina around 1235.
Q 11Which river, Africa's third longest, bends in a great arc past the trading cities of the Mali and Songhai empires?
Niger
The Niger rises near the coast yet runs inland towards the Sahara before swinging back south-east, a boomerang course that baffled geographers for two centuries.
Q 12Despite their name, the Benin Bronzes taken by British troops in 1897 are mostly made of which alloy?
Brass
Brass reached Benin partly as manillas, bracelet-shaped ingots bought from European traders, which the royal casters melted down to make their plaques and portrait heads.
Q 13Which Malian town's Great Mosque, the world's largest mud-brick building, is replastered by residents every year?
Djenné
Djenné has had a mosque on the site since around the 13th century, but the building that stands today dates only from 1907. Its yearly replastering is a festival that opens with a race to deliver the plaster.
Q 21Which European country built Elmina Castle in 1482 to trade for West African gold, long before its rivals arrived?
Portugal
Portugal held the fort until the Dutch seized it in 1637, and it is now the oldest surviving European building in sub-Saharan Africa.
Q 22The Mossi Kingdoms, whose chief ruler was titled King of All the World, lay in which modern country?
Burkina Faso
Burkina Faso still has Mossi kings, who reign as traditional monarchs inside the republic. Their ancestors dominated the upper Volta region for hundreds of years.
Q 23Which small sea shells served as money across West Africa's kingdoms, even in regions far inland?
Cowries
Cowries stayed in use for so long that parts of British West Africa still accepted them for tax payments in the early 20th century.
Q 14Which brightly patterned cloth do Ashanti weavers in towns such as Bonwire make from strips of silk and cotton?
Kente
Kente weavers, one oral tradition says, took their first designs from the web of a spider.
Q 15Which city, founded in the 1680s by King Osei Tutu, was the capital of the Ashanti Empire?
Kumasi
Kumasi owes its site, oral tradition says, to the priest Okomfo Anokye, who planted seeds in two places and named the capital where one took root.
Q 16Which North African state sent an army across the Sahara with cannons to crush the Songhai Empire in 1591?
Morocco
Morocco's force was led by Judar Pasha, a Spanish eunuch captured as a child, and its gunpowder weapons, which the Songhai lacked, decided the Battle of Tondibi.
Q 17Which animals did the Songhai army stampede at the enemy at Tondibi in 1591, only for gunfire to turn them back?
Cattle
Cattle, about 1,000 of them, were meant to break the invaders' lines and shield the Songhai infantry, but the noise of cannon sent the herd charging back into its own side.
Q 18Which Tangier-born traveller crossed the Sahara in 1352 to visit the Mali Empire and described its royal court?
Ibn Battuta
Ibn Battuta covered more ground than any other explorer before modern times, and he reached Mali by joining a caravan across the desert.
Q 19According to his successor's own account, an emperor of Mali launched 2,000 ships to explore which body of water?
Atlantic Ocean
Atlantic Ocean voyages of 200 and then 2,000 ships are known only from the story his successor told, and some historians suspect he invented it to explain how he took the throne.
Q 20Which veiled Saharan nomads, nicknamed the Blue People for their indigo cloth, long ran the desert caravans?
Tuareg
Tuareg men, not women, traditionally wear the face veil, and taking it on marks a boy's passage to manhood. Its indigo dye can stain the skin beneath, which is how the nickname arose.
Q 24Which bitter, caffeine-rich forest seed did caravans carry north from the Ashanti Empire to savanna markets?
Kola nuts
Kola nuts went into the first recipes for Coca-Cola in 1886 and Pepsi-Cola in 1893, which is how cola drinks got their name.
Q 25Which dry belt south of the Sahara, home to the Ghana, Mali and Songhai empires, has a name meaning 'shore'?
Sahel
Sahel comes from the Arabic for coast or shore, a figure of speech that treats the Sahara as a sea of sand and its southern edge as the far side.
Q 26The Kanem–Bornu Empire, one of the longest-lived in world history, grew up around which African lake?
Chad
Lake Chad sat on trade routes that linked Egypt in the east, the Sahara to the north and the states to the west, and that traffic sustained the empire for centuries.
Q 27The Oyo Empire could keep horses for its feared cavalry because its heartland was mostly free of which insect?
Tsetse fly
Tsetse fly bites spread nagana, a disease that strikes horses, so the mounts Oyo bought from the north survived only where the insect was scarce.
Q 28The famous Benin mask of Queen Mother Idia, emblem of the 1977 FESTAC festival, is carved from which material?
Ivory
Ivory was prized at Benin's court partly for its whiteness, a sign of ritual purity. Idia herself is remembered in Edo tradition as the only woman who went to war.
Q 29Which European power fought Samori Ture's Wassoulou Empire for sixteen years before capturing him in 1898?
France
France refused his wish to return home after his capture and sent him into exile in Gabon instead.
Q 30Which riverside city, sacked by an invading army in 1591, was the capital of the Songhai Empire?
Gao
Gao was conquered by the Mali Empire near the end of the 13th century, before the Songhai won it back and built an empire of their own around it.