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60 free Johannesburg trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Johannesburg trivia quiz covers South Africa's largest city from the day gold was found on a Witwatersrand farm in 1886 to the G20 summit of 2025. The early questions deal with the prospectors, the disputed origin of the name, the miners' camp that became Ferreirasdorp, the Jameson Raid, the Boer War occupation and the Chinese labourers brought in for the mines. It then turns to apartheid: the townships built to house black workers, the naming of Soweto, the Rivonia raid, the 1976 uprising and the street where two Nobel laureates lived. The middle section is about the place itself: why the streets are 1,753 metres up, what 'Witwatersrand' and 'fontein' mean, which rivers the ridge divides, how rare snow is, the six million trees, and the mines that reach four kilometres underground. Then come the modern city's landmarks and institutions: Sandton, the Hillbrow Tower, FNB Stadium and Ellis Park, the Wanderers, Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates, O. R. Tambo airport, the Gautrain and Rea Vaya, Wits and the University of Johannesburg, and Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital. Some questions are easy for anyone who knows South Africa; others will test Joburgers themselves. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on Johannesburg, Soweto and the Witwatersrand Gold Rush.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is Johannesburg's Zulu name, which refers to its founding mineral?
iGoli
The city is also known colloquially as Jozi, Joburg or 'the City of Gold'; the Xhosa form is eGoli.
Q 02Johannesburg is the capital of which South African province?
Gauteng
It is the country's wealthiest province, and the city alone produces 16 per cent of South Africa's GDP.
Q 03Which of South Africa's highest institutions sits in Johannesburg?
The Constitutional Court
Parliament sits in Cape Town and the executive in Pretoria; the Supreme Court of Appeal is in Bloemfontein.
Q 04What was the population of the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality at the 2022 census?
4.8 million
The wider metropolitan area held about 15.1 million people, one of the 100 largest urban areas in the world.
Q 05The name Soweto is an abbreviation of what?
South Western Townships
The collective name for the townships was chosen through a competition and officially adopted by the city council in 1963.
Q 06In which year did the city council officially adopt the name Soweto?
1963
A competition to find a collective name had been launched in 1959, and William Carr had first proposed one in 1949.
Q 07Who first discovered a Witwatersrand gold reef, in June 1884 on the farm Vogelstruisfontein?
Jan Gerritse Bantjes
Rhodes rode up from Kimberley to see for himself, stayed two nights in Bantjes's camp and bought his first refined gold for £3,000.
Q 08How much did Cecil Rhodes pay Bantjes in 1884 for the first pure refined Witwatersrand gold?
£3,000
It was the first commercial transaction in Witwatersrand gold; Rhodes and Sir Joseph Robinson had ridden 400 km from Kimberley to check the rumours.
Q 09George Harrison and George Walker are credited with finding the Main Reef outcrop in 1886 on which farm?
Langlaagte
Harrison, an Australian, did not stay long in the area that became Johannesburg.
Q 10Bantjes's Kromdraai Gold Mine, worked from 1881, lay in which area, now a World Heritage Site?
The Cradle of Humankind
The same landscape offered a different discovery: fossils of the early ancestors of humankind.
Q 11Johann Rissik and Christiaan Joubert, credited as the source of the city's name, were involved in what?
Surveying the site for the settlement
Precise records of the name's choice were lost; the first government official in the area, Johannes Meyer, is another candidate.
Q 12What was Johannesburg's first neighbourhood, surveyed by Jos de Villiers in October 1886?
Randjeslaagte
The name Johannesburg was first used on 3 October 1886, and within ten years the city held 100,000 people.
Q 13The original miners' camp, led informally by Col Ignatius Ferreira, became which present-day suburb?
Ferreirasdorp
Q 21What is the lowest temperature ever recorded in Johannesburg, on 13 June 1979?
−8.2 °C
The lowest daytime maximum, 1.5 °C, came on 19 June 1964; winter nights regularly bring frost.
Q 22Roughly how many trees are estimated to grow in Johannesburg?
Six million
About 1.2 million line pavements and 4.8 million stand in private gardens.
Q 23The Johannesburg Botanical Garden is in which suburb?
Emmarentia
It is maintained, with the city's parks and zoo, by Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo.
Q 24The Jameson Raid ended in fiasco in January 1896 at which place?
The tented camp in the Fordsburg dip had 3,000 people by 1887 before the Transvaal government surveyed it as Ferreira's Township.
Q 14Some mines near Johannesburg reach how deep?
4,000 metres
They are among the deepest in the world; at one point the Witwatersrand produced forty per cent of the planet's gold.
Q 15At its peak, what share of the world's gold came from the Witwatersrand?
40 per cent
Gold mining no longer takes place inside the city limits, though most mining houses still keep their headquarters there.
Q 16What does 'Witwatersrand' mean in English?
Ridge of white waters
Early settlers noticed glistening rocks running with water on the ridges; another theory credits the sheen of the quartzite after rain.
Q 17What does 'fontein', ending many farm names around the city, mean in the local Dutch-derived language?
Spring
Braamfontein, Doornfontein and Zandfontein are examples; most of the springs are now covered in concrete and canalised.
Q 18The Witwatersrand ridge marks the watershed between which two rivers?
Limpopo and Vaal
The north of the city drains via the Jukskei River and the south, including the old CBD, via the Klip River.
Q 19Johannesburg sits on the Highveld plateau at what elevation?
1,753 m
The altitude keeps temperatures mild, with January maximums averaging 25.6 °C, but pushes the summer UV index to an extreme 14–16.
Q 20Which of these dates saw snow settle up to 10 cm in Johannesburg's southern suburbs?
27 June 2007
Snow is rare; other 21st-century falls came on 7 August 2012 and 10 July 2023.
Doornkop
Tension between the Boer government in Pretoria and the British over the goldfields led on to the Second Boer War three years later.
Q 25Which British commander's forces occupied Johannesburg on 30 May 1900 during the Second Boer War?
Lord Roberts
The fighting took place to the south-west of the city, in areas that are now Chiawelo, Senaoane and Eldorado Park.
Q 26To ease a labour shortage during the Boer War, the mines brought in workers from which country?
China
Many stayed on, founding a community that under apartheid was legally classified not as 'Asian' but as 'Coloured'.
Q 27Which corporation, founded by Ernest Oppenheimer, made Johannesburg its headquarters in 1917?
Anglo-American
It grew into one of the world's largest companies, dominating South African gold and diamond mining.
Q 28Soweto was intended to house how many people when it was built for black mineworkers?
50,000
It soon held ten times that number, and by 1989 its population was thought to equal or exceed Johannesburg's.
Q 29In June 1955 the Congress of the People adopted the Freedom Charter in which part of Soweto?
Kliptown
Walter Sisulu Square now marks the site.
Q 30Police arrested nine ANC members including Mandela in which Johannesburg suburb in July 1963?
Rivonia
The resulting trial made Mandela a national figure; the accused admitted planning sabotage against the city's hydro-electric system.