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50 free Kalahari trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Kalahari trivia quiz covers the great semi-arid sand sea of southern Africa, a 'desert' with too much grass to be a true one. The easy questions handle the basics: which countries it covers, what the name means in Tswana, the colour of its sand, the only permanent river, the small mongoose that stands sentry on its dunes and the film about a bottle that fell from the sky. From there it moves through the geography, the ancient Lake Makgadikgadi and its salt pans, the Okavango Delta that became UNESCO's 1000th World Heritage Site, and the wildlife from gemsbok to brown hyena. The harder half is for travellers and naturalists: the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and Africa's first peace park, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and the eviction of the San, the Tsodilo Hills rock art, the Kalahari Debate among anthropologists, the arrow poison from beetle larvae, the Eye of Kuruman, camel thorn seeds as coffee, the meerkat's immunity to scorpion venom, and the Kalahari Meerkat Project behind Meerkat Manor. If you enjoyed our Sahara or Africa quizzes, this is the deep dive on one landscape. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the Kalahari Desert, its parks, peoples and animals before publishing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What colour is the sand that covers vast areas of the Kalahari?
Red
Roughly 900,000 square kilometres of it spread across three countries with no permanent surface water.
Q 02The name Kalahari comes from a Tswana word meaning what?
The great thirst
The related word Kgalagadi means 'a waterless place', and the desert has huge areas of red sand with no permanent surface water.
Q 03Roughly how large is the Kalahari Desert?
About 900,000 sq km
The surrounding Kalahari Basin is far bigger still, at over 2.5 million square kilometres.
Q 04The Kalahari's only permanent river ends not in the sea but in what?
An inland delta
Its marshes in the north-west of the desert are rich in wildlife.
Q 05Why is the Kalahari not strictly a desert even where rainfall is very low?
Its ground cover of vegetation is too dense
Only the far south-west, around the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, is bare enough to count as true semi-desert.
Q 06Which true desert lies to the west of the Kalahari, along the Atlantic coast?
The Namib
After good rains the Kalahari has huge tracts of excellent grazing and supports far more life than its coastal neighbour.
Q 07Roughly how much rain do the driest parts of the Kalahari receive each year?
110–200 mm
The wettest north-eastern areas get just over 500 mm, and the driest spots log more than 4,000 hours of sunshine a year.
Q 08During which months is frost common in the Kalahari?
June to August
Its altitude of 600 to 1,600 metres keeps it cooler than the Sahel, so winter nights can drop well below freezing.
Q 09Which cavern beneath the Kalahari holds the largest documented non-subglacial underground lake?
Dragon's Breath Cave
Huge subterranean water reserves under the desert may be leftovers of the ancient lakes that once covered it.
Q 10Which vast ancient body of water once dominated the Kalahari before draining or drying up about 10,000 years ago?
Lake Makgadikgadi
It may have covered 120,000 square kilometres, an area larger than Switzerland; its salt pans are what remain.
Q 11Which fruit, also called the horned melon or jelly melon, is endemic to a region of the Kalahari?
The kiwano
Its exact home region within the desert is unknown.
Q 12For roughly how long have the San people lived as hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari?
20,000 years
They hunt with bows and poisoned arrows and get most of their water from roots and desert melons.
Q 13In what do the San traditionally store water in the Kalahari?
Blown-out ostrich eggshells
During droughts they also dig sip wells, sucking water up through a hollow grass stem into the shell.
Q 21In 2000 the Kgalagadi reserve was launched as southern Africa's first what?
Peace park
Presidents Festus Mogae and Thabo Mbeki opened it; a section within it later became Africa's first International Dark Sky Sanctuary.
Q 22The Central Kalahari Game Reserve is the second-largest game reserve in the world and covers what share of Botswana?
Almost 10%
At 52,800 square kilometres it is larger than the Netherlands, and a 2008 bush fire burned about 80 percent of it.
Q 23In 2006, Botswana's High Court ruled that the eviction of which people from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve was unlawful?
The San and Bakgalagadi
Q 14The San tip their arrows with diamphotoxin, a slow-acting poison produced by what?
Beetle larvae
The larvae belong to the genus Diamphidia, and insects also supply about a tenth of the San's animal protein.
Q 15Which South African writer brought the Kalahari San to world attention in the 1950s with The Lost World of the Kalahari?
Laurens van der Post
The most famous rock-art panel at the Tsodilo Hills is named after him.
Q 16What is the Kalahari Debate, which began among anthropologists in the 1980s, about?
Whether the San were always isolated hunter-gatherers
Traditionalists like Richard Lee say yes; revisionists led by Edwin Wilmsen argue the San long traded with and were marginalised by neighbours.
Q 17Which 1980 comedy follows a Kalahari San hunter trying to return a Coca-Cola bottle to the deities who dropped it?
The Gods Must Be Crazy
Jamie Uys's film became the most successful South African movie ever made at the time and spawned a sequel plus three unofficial Hong Kong follow-ups.
Q 18Jamie Uys's 1980 Kalahari comedy was shot in Botswana and in Tsumkwe, in what is now which country?
Namibia
Its star, Nǃxau ǂToma, had actually grown up as a herder on a farm rather than as a hunter-gatherer.
Q 19Roughly what share of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park lies on the Botswana side of the border?
About three-quarters
Its 38,000 square kilometres combine two adjoining national parks, and Kgalagadi means 'place of thirst'.
Q 20How often are the Nossob and Auob rivers in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park said to flow?
About once a century
Water still runs underground beneath the dry beds, feeding grass and camel thorn trees.
Removals had begun in 1997, the year after De Beers evaluated diamond prospects at Gope; a mine called Ghaghoo opened inside the reserve in 2014.
Q 24Which fossil riverbed in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve began forming around 16,000 years ago?
Deception Valley
It is one of four fossilised rivers meandering through the flat, bush-covered reserve.
Q 25The Okavango Delta became which numbered site on the UNESCO World Heritage List in June 2014?
The 1000th
A year earlier it had been declared one of the Seven Natural Wonders of Africa.
Q 26The Okavango's floodwaters come from summer rain in the highlands of which country?
Angola
The surge travels 1,200 km in about a month, and the delta peaks in Botswana's dry winter, swelling to three times its permanent size.
Q 27What ultimately happens to nearly all the water that reaches the Okavango Delta?
It evaporates or is transpired by plants
About 11 cubic kilometres a year spread over the sandy floodplains, and much seeps into the shallow aquifer first.
Q 28Which of the Makgadikgadi's individual pans is the largest, at about 4,900 square kilometres?
Sua Pan
Sua Pan is also the lowest point in the basin, and holds the baobab-studded national monument of Kubu Island.
Q 29A 2019 DNA study suggested what about the Makgadikgadi region 200,000 years ago?
Modern humans first began to evolve there
At the time it was a fertile wetland of lakes, rivers, marshes and grasslands rather than a salt crust.
Q 30Which birds arrive on the Makgadikgadi pans in tens of thousands during the rainy season?
Flamingos
The pans also host one of Africa's biggest zebra populations once the rains bring grass.