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60 free Chad trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Chad is Africa's fifth-largest country and one of its least visited, a landlocked expanse that runs from the dunes and volcanoes of the Sahara down through the Sahel to green savanna. It is where the oldest known human-line fossil was dug up, where pickup trucks beat Gaddafi's tanks, and where a father-and-son dynasty has held power since 1990. Its flag is almost identical to Romania's, its capital was a French fort, and its shrinking lake gives the country its name. This quiz covers geography (Lake Chad, Emi Koussi and the Tibesti, the Ennedi and its crocodiles, the Bodele dust, the Ounianga lakes), history (Kanem, Wadai, Fort-Lamy, Tombalbaye, Habre and the Toyota War, the Aouzou Strip, Idriss and Mahamat Deby), symbols (the indigo-yellow-red flag, 'La Tchadienne', the CFA franc), culture (Sara and Toubou, millet balls, carcaje tea, Haroun's films) and sport (Les Sao, wrestling in dust). Questions run from easy to expert. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and other reference pages before publishing.
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Q 01What is the capital and largest city of Chad?
N'Djamena
Roughly one in twelve Chadians lives there, on the Chari River opposite Cameroon's Kousséri.
Q 02Under what name did the French found Chad's capital in 1910?
Fort-Lamy
It honoured army officer Amédée-François Lamy, killed fighting the warlord Rabih in 1900.
Q 03Chad is named after the great water body on its western border, whose Kanuri name simply means what?
Lake
The modern water body is the remnant of a mega-lake that covered 330,000 km2 some 7,000 years ago.
Q 04Which two languages are official in Chad?
French and Arabic
More than 100 regional tongues are also spoken, and the Chadic branch of the Afroasiatic family is named after the country.
Q 05Chad's vertical tricolour flag is often noted for its similarity to the flag of which European country?
Romania
The blue was chosen instead of green to avoid confusion with Mali.
Q 06Which colour on Chad's flag stands for the sands of the Sahara?
Yellow
Indigo represents the lake and Black African heritage, and red the blood shed for independence.
Q 07Chad gained independence from France on 11 August of which year?
1960
Its first president banned opposition parties two years later.
Q 08Who was Chad's first president, overthrown and killed in 1975?
François Tombalbaye
He forced civil servants to undergo yondo ritual scarring and had a dissident assassinated in Paris.
Q 09Which Chadian dictator, "Africa's Pinochet", was sentenced to life in prison by a tribunal in Senegal in 2016?
Hissène Habré
He fled to Dakar in 1990 with $11m of public money and was convicted of ordering some 40,000 killings.
Q 10The 1987 final phase of the Chadian-Libyan war is nicknamed after which vehicles used by Chadian troops?
Toyota pickup trucks
Hilux and Land Cruiser 'technicals' helped inflict a defeat in which Libya lost a tenth of its army.
Q 11Which slice of northern Chad, claimed by Libya for supposed uranium, was awarded to Chad by the ICJ in 1994?
The Aouzou Strip
It runs about 100 km deep along the border and had been added to Italian Libya in 1935.
Q 12Which president ruled Chad for 30 years until killed fighting rebels in April 2021?
Idriss Déby
A Zaghawa general who took power in a 1990 coup, he was Chad's longest-serving leader.
Q 13Mahamat Déby, who succeeded his father in 2021 and won a 2024 election, has what nickname?
Kaka
Trained in France, he had led Chadian special forces against jihadists in northern Mali in 2013.
Q 21Which is Chad's oldest national park, declared in 1963 and known for its elephants?
Zakouma
African Parks has run it since 2010, after poaching massacres of elephant herds.
Q 22Which two rivers flow from the southeast into Lake Chad?
The Chari and Logone
They meet at the capital, which forms a cross-border conurbation with Cameroon's Kousséri.
Q 23Because of its distance from the sea and its desert climate, Chad has been called what?
The Dead Heart of Africa
The nearest seaport is Douala in Cameroon, 1,060 km from the capital.
Q 14Which rebel group's 2021 offensive from the north led to the death of Chad's long-time president?
FACT
The Front for Change and Concord in Chad struck just after he had won a sixth term.
Q 15Which dormant volcano is the highest point in Chad and in the entire Sahara?
Emi Koussi
It rises about 3,400 m at the southeast end of the northern mountains and has been studied as an analogue for a Martian volcano.
Q 16Which mountain range in Chad's far north contains the Sahara's highest peaks?
The Tibesti
Its name means 'place where the mountain people live'; French colonists only took control in 1929.
Q 17The Guelta d'Archei, a desert pool where camels drink beside relict crocodiles, lies on which sandstone plateau?
The Ennedi
Rock paintings show the West African crocodile once thrived across the Sahara; the site is a four-day drive from the capital.
Q 18Which natural arch in northeastern Chad is the longest outside China and Utah?
Aloba
Its span is about 76 m, but its height of roughly 120 m is even more striking.
Q 19A group of 18 desert lakes in northeastern Chad, a World Heritage Site since 2012, is known by what name?
Ounianga
They survive in a place with under 2 mm of rain a year; the largest, Lake Yoa, is about 25 m deep.
Q 20Dust from Chad's Bodélé Depression is said to supply over half the nutrients feeding which ecosystem?
The Amazon rainforest
The dry basin is the country's lowest point and made of diatoms from a prehistoric mega-lake.
Q 24Chad is the fifth-largest country in Africa; how many countries border it?
Six
They are Libya, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Nigeria and Niger.
Q 25The seven-million-year-old skull nicknamed Toumaï, found in Chad, belongs to which genus?
Sahelanthropus
The president himself chose the nickname, honouring a fallen comrade-in-arms.
Q 26Toumaï, the name given to the famous Chadian fossil skull, means what in the Daza language?
Hope of life
It is a name given to babies born just before the dry season, whose survival chances are slim.
Q 27Which empire, founded around 700 AD near the lake, was the first and longest-lasting state in Chad's Sahel?
Kanem
Its scribes developed their own script style, the barnawi, and its capital Njimi lay in what is now Chad.
Q 28Which sultanate east of the lake, founded in the 1600s, made Abéché its capital and resisted French conquest?
Wadai
It fell to France only in 1912; the old town still holds sultans' tombs and a 19th-century Grand Mosque.
Q 29Which Sudanese warlord's forces did three French columns defeat at Kousséri in April 1900?
Rabih az-Zubayr
The victory linked France's African possessions and opened the way to the military territory of Chad.
Q 30Which black governor of Chad rallied the colony to Charles de Gaulle's Free French in 1940?
Félix Éboué
Born in French Guiana, he had earlier been the first Black man to hold a senior colonial post, as governor of Guadeloupe.