Burkina Faso Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
58 free Burkina Faso trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Burkina Faso is the landlocked Sahel country that used to be called Upper Volta until a young Marxist captain renamed it the "Land of Upright People" in 1984. It hosts Africa's biggest film festival, sits on West Africa's fourth-largest gold reserves, has had more coups than most countries have had elections, and gave the continent one of its most quoted revolutionaries. This quiz covers geography (the three Voltas, Ténakourou, W National Park), history (the Mossi kingdoms and Princess Yennenga, French rule, Sankara and Compaoré, the 2014 uprising and the 2022 coups, the Alliance of Sahel States), symbols and culture (the flag, tô and dolo, FESPACO and SIAO, the Mogho Naba's Friday ceremony), and sport (the Stallions' 2013 run, Zango's triple-jump bronze). Questions run from easy to expert. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and other reference pages before publishing.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital and largest city of Burkina Faso?
Ouagadougou
Ouagadougou, which locals shorten to Ouaga, was the seat of the largest Mossi kingdom for centuries before the French arrived, and the Mossi king still holds court in the city.
Q 02Under what name was Burkina Faso known until 1984?
Upper Volta
Upper Volta (Haute-Volta) was the colonial and early independence-era name, taken from the upper course of the Volta river system; the change came on 4 August 1984.
Q 03What does the name Burkina Faso, coined from Mooré and Dyula words, mean?
Land of upright (honest) people
Land of upright (honest) people: Burkina is Mooré for upright or honest and Faso is Dyula for fatherland, while the ending of Burkinabè, the people's name, was borrowed from a third language, Fula.
Q 04Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso's revolutionary president of the 1980s, is often nicknamed Africa's what?
Che Guevara
Che Guevara: like Che, Sankara was a young Marxist revolutionary who died by the gun. He took power at 33 and was shot dead at 37 in a coup that put his close friend in charge.
Q 05Sankara's government planted more than how many trees to fight the advance of the Sahara?
10 million
10 million trees were planted in little more than a year to slow the desert, and in 1985 the government launched 'three struggles' against bush fires, stray livestock and the reckless felling of firewood.
Q 06Sankara built a populist image partly by doing what with the government's luxury vehicles?
Selling them off
Selling them off: Sankara sold the government's fleet of Mercedes cars and made the modest Renault 5 the official car for his ministers.
Q 07Who seized power in the October 1987 coup and then ruled Burkina Faso for 27 years?
Blaise Compaoré
Blaise Compaoré, once a close friend and bandmate of the predecessor he overthrew, ruled until the 2014 uprising and was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment in 2022 for that predecessor's murder.
Q 08What triggered the October 2014 uprising that toppled Burkina Faso's president of 27 years?
A bid to extend his term
A bid to extend his term set it off: as parliament prepared to vote on lifting the limit, protesters burned the National Assembly on 30 October 2014, and he resigned and fled the next day.
Q 09Ibrahim Traoré, who seized power in September 2022, held what distinction at age 34?
World's youngest head of state at the time
World's youngest head of state at the time: Traoré was 34 when he led the country's second coup of 2022, in September, and the following year he ordered French troops out.
Q 10In 2023 Burkina Faso formed a mutual defence pact with which two neighbours?
Mali and Niger
Mali and Niger signed the Liptako-Gourma Charter with Burkina Faso in September 2023, creating the Alliance of Sahel States; the three junta-led countries declared a confederation in 2024 and left ECOWAS in 2025.
Q 11Rural women in Burkina Faso gather wild savanna tree nuts to make which export?
Shea butter
Shea butter is sold abroad for skin creams and, less famously, for chocolate, where it stands in for cocoa butter.
Q 12Which warrior princess of Mossi legend rode away from her father's kingdom and married a hunter?
Yennenga
Yennenga was, in legend, the daughter of a Dagomba king; her son with the hunter Rialé, Ouédraogo, went on to found the first of the Mossi kingdoms.
Q 13The Tour du Faso, raced across Burkina Faso most years since 1987, is an event in which sport?
Road cycling
Road cycling: the ten-day stage race was run until 2008 by the organisers of the Tour de France, and its 2014 edition was called off because of the Ebola outbreak.
Q 21The ancient furnaces at five Burkina Faso sites, listed as World Heritage in 2019, were built to smelt which metal?
Iron
Iron: about fifteen furnaces still stand across the five sites, built to draw in air on their own draught instead of being pumped with bellows.
Q 22Which country did Burkina Faso fight in the five-day 'Christmas War' of December 1985?
Mali
Mali sent tanks over the border on Christmas Day 1985 in a quarrel over the Agacher Strip; after a ceasefire, the International Court of Justice split the strip between the two in 1986.
Q 23Which city, known locally as Sya, is Burkina Faso's second largest?
Bobo-Dioulasso
Bobo-Dioulasso was simply Sya until 1904, when a French colonel renamed it 'home of the Bobo-Dioula' after its people; it is still called the country's economic capital.
Q 14The traditional Mossi ruler based in the capital, whose title means "king of the world", is called what?
Mogho Naba
Mogho Naba: every Friday morning he comes out of his palace in the capital dressed in red as if riding to war, and his ministers ritually talk him out of leaving.
Q 15Burkina Faso's flag shows a yellow star on horizontal bands of which two colours?
Red and green
Red and green: adopted on 4 August 1984 in Pan-African colours, the red is said to stand for the revolutionary struggle, the green for hope and abundance, and the yellow star for the revolution's guiding light.
Q 16Which three colours, one for each of its main rivers, striped Burkina Faso's flag until 1984?
Black, white and red
Black, white and red stripes flew until 4 August 1984, a year to the day after Sankara's 1983 coup, when they gave way to the Pan-African colours flown by its neighbours as a show of unity with other former colonies.
Q 17The capital hosts FESPACO, which is what?
Africa's largest film festival
Africa's largest film festival: FESPACO began as a week of screenings in 1969, was made a state institution by decree in 1972, and now takes over the capital's cinemas every odd-numbered year.
Q 18Idrissa Ouédraogo's Tilaï, a drama set in a Burkina Faso village, won the Grand Prix at which 1990 festival?
Cannes
Cannes gave Tilaï its Grand Prix in 1990 for the story of a man who comes home to find the woman he loves married to his own father.
Q 19Which commodity has been Burkina Faso's leading export since the late 2000s?
Gold
Gold overtook farm crops as the leading export in the late 2000s as a wave of industrial mines opened from 2007, and within a few years it was earning well over half of all export income.
Q 20Which French-promoted crop was long Burkina Faso's main cash export?
Cotton
Cotton was pushed hard by French colonial administrators, and after the early drive failed Paris broke the colony up in 1932; the crop still went on to be the country's leading cash earner for decades.
Q 24The Grand Mosque in Burkina Faso's second city, a landmark of Sudano-Sahelian style, is built mainly of what?
Mud brick
Mud brick: tradition says the mosque came out of a bargain, a Muslim cleric helping the local king against an invading army in return for a promise to build it.
Q 25Burkina Faso's national dish tô is what?
A stiff porridge of millet, sorghum or maize
A stiff porridge of millet, sorghum or maize, tô is left to set, then pinched off by hand and dipped in a sauce of baobab leaves or okra; it is the everyday staple rather than a feast dish.
Q 26Poulet bicyclette, a Burkinabé speciality, is what?
Grilled free-range chicken
Grilled free-range chicken: the lean village birds are said to owe the name either to the sellers who carry them to market by bicycle or to a strut like a racing cyclist's.
Q 27Burkina Faso's national football team is nicknamed what?
The Stallions
The Stallions (Les Étalons) are named for the horse that carried the warrior princess of legend to the hunter she married; Ouédraogo, a very common surname in the country, itself means stallion.
Q 28Hugues Fabrice Zango won Burkina Faso's first-ever Olympic medal in 2021 in which event?
Triple jump
Triple jump: Zango took bronze in Tokyo as a part-time athlete working on a doctorate in electrical engineering, then became world champion and Dr Zango within months of each other in 2023.
Q 29Which Burkinabé forward, once at Chelsea and Lyon, debuted for the national team at 15?
Bertrand Traoré
Bertrand Traoré played for his country at 15, but after Chelsea signed him he waited 18 months for a work permit, spending them on loan at Vitesse in the Netherlands.
Q 30Burkina Faso was one of 17 colonies that won independence in 1960, a year now known as what?
The Year of Africa
The Year of Africa saw 17 colonies become independent; Burkina Faso's turn came on 5 August 1960, though it kept its colonial name for another 24 years.