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48 free Kenya trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Kenya is where some of the earliest humans walked, where two million wildebeest cross the Mara each year, where the only capital city with a national park inside it sits, and where a lineage of runners has dominated distance events for fifty years. It also invented mobile money, grows the flowers in your supermarket, and named itself after a mountain. This Kenya trivia quiz covers all of it. Forty-nine questions run from geography (Nairobi, Mombasa, Mount Kenya, the Rift Valley, Lake Turkana, Lake Nakuru, the Maasai Mara) through history (Koobi Fora and the Turkana Boy, the Swahili coast, Vasco da Gama at Malindi, Fort Jesus, the Uganda Railway and the Tsavo man-eaters, Karen Blixen, Mau Mau, independence in 1963, Kenyatta, Moi, Kibaki, Ruto) to culture and economy (Swahili, the shilling, the flag, ugali, tea and flowers, M-Pesa, Ngũgĩ, Lupita Nyong'o) and sport (Kipchoge, Rudisha, Kip Keino, the Sevens). Roughly a third are easy, a third medium, and the rest are for people who really know East Africa. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedia and official pages, so the dates, numbers and names are ones you can rely on.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital and largest city of Kenya?
Nairobi
Nairobi, founded in 1899 as a railway depot on the Uganda line, takes its name from the Maasai Enkare Nyirobi, 'place of cool waters', and is nicknamed the Green City in the Sun.
Q 02Which port city is Kenya's second-largest and oldest?
Mombasa
Mombasa, settled around AD 900 on an island now linked to the mainland by causeways, was the first capital of British East Africa before Nairobi took over early in the 20th century.
Q 03Kenya's highest peak, Batian, rises to what height?
5,199 m
Batian, Mount Kenya's summit, stands 5,199 m high, making it Africa's second-highest mountain after Kilimanjaro; the peak sits just 16.5 km south of the equator.
Q 04In 1920 the East Africa Protectorate became a colony renamed after what?
Its highest mountain
Kenya Colony, proclaimed in 1920, took its name from Mount Kenya, the country's highest mountain; Kikuyu speakers call the peak Kĩrĩnyaga, 'mountain of brightness', and the colonial name derives from it.
Q 05Which body of water, mostly in northern Kenya, is the world's largest permanent desert lake?
Turkana
Lake Turkana, the Jade Sea, is also the world's largest alkaline lake; it depends on Ethiopia's Omo River for most of its inflow, which the Gibe III dam, completed in 2016, has reduced.
Q 06What nickname was given to the near-complete Homo erectus skeleton Kamoya Kimeu found in 1984?
Turkana Boy
Turkana Boy (KNM-WT 15000), a 1.6-million-year-old Homo erectus youth, was found by Kamoya Kimeu at Nariokotome on the western shore of Lake Turkana in 1984 and is one of the most complete early hominin skeletons known.
Q 07In the Maa language, what does "Mara" mean?
Spotted
The Maasai described the plain, dotted with short bushy trees, as spotted when seen from afar.
Q 08Which five animals make up Africa's "Big Five", all found in Kenya's Maasai Mara?
Lion, leopard, buffalo, rhino, elephant
The Big Five are lion, leopard, buffalo, rhino and elephant, a term hunters coined for the animals most dangerous to pursue on foot; all five live in the Maasai Mara.
Q 09Two man-eating lions killed dozens of railway workers in 1898 in which region of Kenya?
Tsavo
Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson eventually shot them and wrote The Man-eaters of Tsavo.
Q 10Which Portuguese explorer was welcomed at Malindi in 1498?
Vasco da Gama
Vasco da Gama put in at Malindi in April 1498 and, with a pilot taken on there, sailed on to Calicut in India; Malindi, long a rival of Mombasa, keeps a coral pillar he erected.
Q 11Which king ordered Fort Jesus, built 1593–96 to guard the port of Kenya's main coastal city?
Philip II of Spain
Philip II of Spain, who also ruled Portugal as Filipe I during the Iberian Union, ordered Fort Jesus; designed by the Italian architect Giovanni Battista Cairati, it was inscribed by UNESCO in 2011.
Q 12Which missionary pair, based at Rabai, first reported Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya to Europe?
Krapf and Rebmann
Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann, German missionaries at Rabai near Mombasa, were the first Europeans to see Kilimanjaro (Rebmann, 1848) and Mount Kenya (Krapf, 1849); their reports of snow on the equator were ridiculed in Europe.
Q 13Which two places name the 1890 treaty in which Germany gave up Witu, on Kenya's coast?
Q 21Who succeeded Kenya's first president in 1978 and ruled until 2002?
Daniel arap Moi
Daniel arap Moi, Kenyatta's vice-president, took over on his death in August 1978 and ruled until December 2002; his 1988 election used the mlolongo system, in which voters queued behind their candidate instead of casting a secret ballot.
Q 22Kenya's 1992 elections began multiparty politics after 25-plus years of rule by which party?
KANU
KANU, in power since independence, won 100 of 188 seats in the December 1992 election thanks to a divided opposition; Moi was re-elected again in 1997 amid claims of fraud.
Q 23Who won the 2002 election for the National Rainbow Coalition, ending KANU's four decades in power?
Mwai Kibaki
Heligoland and Zanzibar
The Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty of 1890 gave Germany the North Sea island of Heligoland and the Caprivi Strip, while Britain gained Witu and a free hand over Zanzibar; the Imperial British East Africa Company had arrived in 1888.
Q 14Which people, led by Koitalel Arap Samoei, mounted the longest resistance to British rule in East Africa?
The Nandi
The Nandi fought the British from 1895 to 1905, raiding the Uganda Railway through their highlands; their orkoiyot Koitalel Arap Samoei was shot dead at a parley by Richard Meinertzhagen in October 1905.
Q 15Whose 1937 memoir Out of Africa depicts colonial Kenya from a settler's perspective?
Karen Blixen
Karen Blixen, writing as Isak Dinesen, published Out of Africa in 1937 about her years running a coffee farm near Nairobi; the city's Karen suburb is named after her.
Q 16Kenya's Mau Mau state of emergency, declared in October 1952, was lifted in which year?
1960
The emergency ran from 20 October 1952 to 12 January 1960; the Kenya Land and Freedom Army was mainly Kikuyu, Embu and Meru, and more than 80,000 Kikuyu were detained without trial.
Q 17Whose capture on 21 October 1956 in Nyeri marked the effective defeat of the Mau Mau?
Dedan Kimathi
Dedan Kimathi, the Mau Mau's senior field marshal, was wounded and captured near Nyeri on 21 October 1956 and hanged in February 1957; 'General China', Waruhiu Itote, had been taken in January 1954.
Q 18On what date did Kenya become independent?
12 December 1963
Kenya became independent on 12 December 1963 and exactly a year later became a republic; the date is celebrated as Jamhuri Day, jamhuri being Swahili for 'republic'.
Q 19Who was Kenya's first president?
Jomo Kenyatta
Jomo Kenyatta became prime minister at independence in 1963 and president when Kenya turned republic in 1964, serving until his death in 1978; his son Uhuru was president from 2013 to 2022.
Q 20Which conflict pitted Kenya against Somali separatists in its north-east from 1963 to 1967?
The Shifta War
The Shifta War (1963–67) followed Britain's refusal to let the Somali-majority Northern Frontier District join Somalia; Kenya called the rebels shifta, 'bandits', and the fighting ended with the 1967 Arusha agreement.
Mwai Kibaki won the December 2002 election for NARC with about 62% of the vote; his disputed 2007 re-election triggered violence that ended with Raila Odinga becoming prime minister in 2008.
Q 24Who narrowly won the 2022 election to become Kenya's fifth president?
William Ruto
William Ruto, Uhuru Kenyatta's deputy, beat Raila Odinga with 50.5% of the August 2022 vote; his Kenya Kwanza coalition faced mass protests over the 2024 Finance Bill, which he then withdrew.
Q 25Who was the first sitting US president to visit Kenya, in July 2015?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan, visited Nairobi in July 2015 for the Global Entrepreneurship Summit; he had skipped Kenya on his 2013 African tour while Uhuru Kenyatta faced ICC charges.
Q 26Into how many semi-autonomous counties is Kenya divided?
47
Kenya has 47 counties, each headed by an elected governor; created by the 2010 constitution and operating since the 2013 election, they replaced the eight old provinces.
Q 27What are Kenya's two official languages?
English and Swahili
English and Swahili are the official languages under the 2010 constitution, with Swahili also the national language; Sheng, a street mixture of the two, is widespread, and Swahili is a Bantu tongue full of Arabic loanwords.
Q 28Which is Kenya's largest ethnic group, with about 8.1 million people in the 2019 census?
Kikuyu
The Kikuyu, centred on the highlands around Mount Kenya, numbered about 8.1 million of Kenya's 47.6 million people in 2019; the Luhya, Kalenjin, Luo and Kamba follow, and the Maasai number about 1.2 million.
Q 29What is the currency of Kenya?
Shilling
The Kenyan shilling replaced the East African shilling at par in 1966; amounts are written in the form 100/= for one hundred shillings.
Q 30What object sits at the centre of Kenya's black, red and green flag?
A Maasai shield with crossed spears
A red Maasai shield with two crossed white spears sits at the centre; the design derives from the KANU party flag and was adopted at independence on 12 December 1963.