Xhosa People
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40 free Xhosa People trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Xhosa are one of the largest peoples of southern Africa, with a language heard far beyond the villages where it began and a culture that has shaped presidents, archbishops, musicians and sports captains. Fun facts about the Xhosa turn up in unexpected places, from superhero films to national anthems. This quiz covers the sounds and spelling of isiXhosa, rites of passage, marriage and naming customs, traditional food and drink, beadwork and music, the frontier wars and prophets of the 1800s, and well-known Xhosa figures of modern times. It suits students of South African history, travellers, language lovers and anyone curious about the people behind the name. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up the story as you play.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Xhosa language is spoken on screen as the native tongue of which fictional Marvel kingdom?
Wakanda
Wakanda speaks Xhosa because a South African actor in the cast was a native speaker, and Chadwick Boseman chose to learn whole scenes in it.
Q 02The xh that begins the word Xhosa is pronounced as which kind of sound, rare among the world's languages?
A click
A click made at the side of the mouth, like the sound English speakers use to urge on a horse, opens the word Xhosa. The language writes its three basic clicks as c, q and x.
Q 03Nelson Mandela is affectionately known across South Africa by which Xhosa clan name?
Madiba
Madiba honours the lineage he was born into, and in Xhosa etiquette addressing someone by clan name is the highest form of respect.
Q 04Nelson Mandela's Xhosa birth name, Rolihlahla, carries which fitting colloquial meaning for a future revolutionary?
Troublemaker
Troublemaker is the colloquial sense of Rolihlahla; the English name Nelson came later, given to him by a teacher.
Q 05The Xhosa wedding song Qongqothwane, popularised worldwide by Miriam Makeba, is named after which knocking creature?
Beetle
Beetle, specifically the knocking beetle that taps the ground to attract a mate; in Xhosa oral tradition it guides lost children home.
Q 06In the 1850s the Xhosa destroyed their own herds and crops after a prophecy delivered by which unlikely figure?
A teenage girl
A teenage girl named Nongqawuse, about 15, said spirits promised to sweep the settlers into the sea. Around 40,000 people starved after the prophecy failed.
Q 07Xhosa is South Africa's second most common first language, just behind which closely related tongue?
Zulu
Zulu and Xhosa are largely mutually intelligible, so a speaker of one can usually follow much of the other.
Q 08Umqombothi, made by Xhosa families from fermented maize and sorghum for ceremonies, is a traditional type of what?
Beer
Beer it is, thick, creamy and sour. Brewers test it by holding a lit match near the vat: if the flame dies quickly, the brew is ready.
Q 09Zozibini Tunzi, a Xhosa woman raised in the rural village of Sidwadweni, won which global title in 2019?
Miss Universe
Miss Universe 2019 made her the first winner to take the crown with afro-textured hair. Her name, Zozibini, means received with both hands.
Q 10Which South African province, home to Mthatha and the Wild Coast, is the traditional heartland of the Xhosa people?
Eastern Cape
Eastern Cape was created in 1994 by merging two apartheid-era Xhosa homelands with part of the old Cape Province.
Q 11Which Xhosa homeland became, in 1976, the first Bantustan that apartheid South Africa declared independent?
Transkei
Transkei, whose name means the area beyond the Kei River, was never recognised by any country except South Africa and its fellow Bantustans.
Q 12Which archbishop of Xhosa and Tswana heritage popularised the phrase Rainbow Nation for post-apartheid South Africa?
Desmond Tutu
Desmond Tutu first reached for the image in 1989, describing a multiracial protest crowd. He grew up in a home where his parents spoke Xhosa.
Q 13Which Xhosa politician from the village of Mbewuleni followed Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1999?
Thabo Mbeki
Q 21The amaMfengu, clans who joined the Xhosa nation in the 1800s, carry a name with which meaning?
Wanderers
Wanderers is the meaning, from an old Xhosa verb; tradition holds that their clans had been scattered by the wars of Shaka's era.
Q 22Nelson Mandela was born into the royal family of which Xhosa-speaking nation, once ruled by his great-grandfather?
Thembu
Thembu royalty raised him too: after his father died, he became the ward of the regent Jongintaba at the Great Place palace.
Q 23What is the Xhosa word for a praise poet, the role that earned Samuel Mqhayi the title poet of the nation?
Imbongi
Imbongi perform at great occasions, weaving in the praise names of a chief and his forebears. The young Nelson Mandela once heard Mqhayi recite.
Thabo Mbeki left South Africa at twenty and spent almost three decades in exile before the ANC was unbanned in 1990.
Q 14Which Xhosa activist from Ginsberg township led the Black Consciousness Movement and died in police custody in 1977?
Steve Biko
Steve Biko was 30 when he died after beatings by state security officers, and he became one of the earliest icons of the struggle against apartheid.
Q 15U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, a film shot entirely in Xhosa, won Berlin's Golden Bear by resetting which composer's opera?
Bizet
Bizet's 1875 opera Carmen moves to a modern South African township in the film, which blends the original score with traditional African music.
Q 16Xhosa custom says two people who share the same isiduko, or clan name, are forbidden to do what?
Marry each other
Marry each other they cannot, since a shared clan name marks them as relatives. A wife keeps her own clan name for life, with the prefix Ma- added.
Q 17Xhosa diviners known as amagqirha take up healing only after receiving a calling from whom?
Their ancestors
Their ancestors do the choosing, by tradition. The training that follows, called ukuthwasa, is served under an experienced healer and can last from a few months to many years.
Q 18Traditional Xhosa were nicknamed the red blanket people for dyeing their blankets with which natural pigment?
Ochre
Ochre gave the blankets their colour, and the depth of the red varied from one Xhosa group to the next.
Q 19Which comedian and author of the memoir Born a Crime is the son of a Xhosa mother and a Swiss-German father?
Trevor Noah
Trevor Noah took the title from the fact that his parents' interracial relationship was illegal when he was born, and Xhosa is one of the languages he speaks.
Q 20Which Xhosa rugby player, raised in Zwide township, became the first black captain of the Springboks in 2018?
Siya Kolisi
Siya Kolisi went on to captain South Africa to Rugby World Cup titles in 2019 and 2023, becoming only the second captain to win back-to-back.
Q 24Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, the Xhosa hymn in South Africa's national anthem, was composed in 1897 by someone in which job?
Schoolteacher
Schoolteacher and choirmaster Enoch Sontonga first intended it as a school anthem; decades later it was sung as the anthem of the African National Congress.
Q 25Xhosa is an official language in South Africa and in which neighbouring country, home to a Mfengu community?
Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe has a small but significant Xhosa-speaking community, and the language holds official status there.
Q 26Xhosa belongs, alongside Swazi and Ndebele, to which closely related group of southern Bantu languages?
Nguni
Nguni languages shade into one another like dialects, which is why neighbouring peoples in the group can often follow each other's speech.
Q 27Which university in the town of Alice counts Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Robert Sobukwe among its alumni?
Fort Hare
Fort Hare was a key college for black students from across sub-Saharan Africa between 1916 and 1959, and its graduates went on to lead independence movements.
Q 28Umngqokolo, performed by some Xhosa women in a low, rhythmic voice, is a local style of which unusual vocal art?
Throat singing
Throat singing of this kind has been likened to kargyraa, the deep style of the Tuvan people on the far side of Asia.
Q 29Which city, long called Grahamstown, was renamed in 2018 after the Xhosa warrior-prophet who attacked it in 1819?
Makhanda
Makhanda had promised his fighters that British bullets would turn to water. The renaming was proposed as a symbolic reparation for an unjust past.
Q 30The Seventh Xhosa War of 1846 earned its nickname from the theft of which everyday tool?
Axe
Axe theft lit the fuse: Xhosa raiders attacked the escort marching the accused man to trial, and the colony went to war.