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60 free Lake Victoria trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Lake Victoria trivia quiz covers Africa's largest lake from every angle: geography, exploration, wildlife, fisheries and the people who live around it. The easy questions are the ones any geography fan can handle: which continent, which countries share it, which river flows out and which queen it was named for. From there the set moves into the numbers that surprise people, such as how shallow the lake really is, how much of its water arrives as rain, how many times it has dried up completely and how many people live in its catchment. The harder questions are for East Africa buffs and natural-history fans: the local names in Luganda and Dholuo, Speke's quarrel with Burton and his death on the eve of their debate, the newspaper that paid Stanley to circumnavigate the lake, the 500 haplochromine cichlid species and the predator introduced in the 1950s that wiped out hundreds of them, the water hyacinth invasion, the Ssese Islands, the agreed curve at the Jinja dam and the ferry sinkings that rank among Africa's worst maritime disasters. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the lake, its explorers, its fish and its ferries before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Africa, Nile River and world geography quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Lake Victoria is the largest lake by area on which continent?
Africa
With a surface area close to 60,000 square kilometres it is also the world's largest tropical lake.
Q 02Lake Victoria is the world's second-largest freshwater lake by surface area, behind which lake?
Superior
By volume it ranks only ninth among the world's continental lakes because it is so shallow.
Q 03Which country holds the largest share of Lake Victoria's surface, about 49 percent?
Tanzania
Uganda holds about 45 percent and Kenya just 6 percent.
Q 04Roughly what percentage of Lake Victoria lies within Kenya?
6%
Kenya's slice includes the Kavirondo Gulf.
Q 05Which river is the only outflow from Lake Victoria?
The Nile
It leaves the lake on the northern shore in Uganda.
Q 06Near which Ugandan town does the Nile leave Lake Victoria?
Jinja
For at least 12,000 years the water drained over a natural rock weir there, blasted away by engineers in 1952.
Q 07Which British explorer renamed the lake after Queen Victoria in 1858?
John Hanning Speke
He was the first European to see it, on 30 July 1858, during a 47-day side trip.
Q 08Which fellow explorer, sick at Kazeh, furiously disputed that the lake was the Nile's source?
Richard Francis Burton
Their very public quarrel drew other explorers keen to confirm or refute the discovery.
Q 09Which explorer confirmed the lake as the Nile's source by circumnavigating it in 1875-76?
Henry Morton Stanley
He also established that Lake Tanganyika and the Nile were not connected at all.
Q 10Which newspaper funded Stanley's expedition around the lake?
The New York Herald
The same paper had earlier sent Stanley to find Livingstone.
Q 11Where on the northern shore did Stanley report the lake's great outflow into the Nile?
Ripon Falls
The falls were later flooded by the dam built at the outflow.
Q 12Which missionary-explorer failed to verify the lake's link to the Nile in the 1860s, drifting into the Congo system?
David Livingstone
His wanderings ended with the famous meeting with Stanley at Ujiji.
Q 13How did Speke die on 15 September 1864, the day before a scheduled public debate with Burton?
A gunshot wound while shooting
An inquest ruled it accidental, though Burton loudly spread the idea that it was suicide.
Q 21Roughly how old is Lake Victoria, according to the geological account of its formation?
400,000 years
It formed when a tilting block of crust backed up westward-flowing rivers.
Q 22Sediment cores show Lake Victoria has dried up completely at least how many times since it formed?
Three
The drying cycles are probably linked to past ice ages, when rainfall declined worldwide.
Q 23Which group of fish accounts for more than 500 species in Lake Victoria, almost all found nowhere else?
Haplochromine cichlids
They arose through a rapid burst of evolution in roughly the last 15,000 years.
Q 14In which English city was the Speke-Burton debate on the Nile's source due to take place?
Bath
It was organised by the geographical section of the British Association.
Q 15From which side of the lake did Speke first sight it in 1858?
The south
He had left the ailing Burton behind at Kazeh, near present-day Tabora.
Q 16In Luganda the lake is Nnalubaale; in which language is it called Nam Lolwe?
Dholuo
Its Swahili name is Ukerewe and its Kinyarwanda name is Nyanza.
Q 17Roughly what share of Lake Victoria's water arrives as direct rainfall on the lake?
80%
Evaporation from the surface is about two metres a year, nearly double the rainfall of the surrounding land.
Q 18Which river is the largest flowing into Lake Victoria?
The Kagera
One of its tributaries in Rwanda or Burundi is usually considered the ultimate source of the Nile.
Q 19What is the approximate maximum depth of Lake Victoria?
80 metres
For such a vast lake it is remarkably shallow, averaging just 40 metres.
Q 20Where is the deepest part of Lake Victoria found?
Offset to the east near Kenya
The first true bathymetric map, based on ten thousand digitised points, was produced in 2016.
Q 24Which is the only lake in the world with more fish species than Lake Victoria?
Malawi
Roughly 300 of Victoria's cichlid species have still not been formally described.
Q 25Which large predatory fish, introduced in the 1950s, is blamed for the extinction of hundreds of the lake's cichlids?
Nile perch
Its arrival has been called the most dramatic example of human-caused extinctions within an ecosystem.
Q 26How large can the invasive predator Lates niloticus grow?
Nearly 2 metres and 200 kg
Mature fish typically measure 1.2 to 1.4 metres.
Q 27What is the meaning of the Hausa name for Lates niloticus, giwan ruwa?
Water elephant
In French-speaking countries it is simply called capitaine.
Q 28Which Australian state levies heavy fines for possessing a live Lates niloticus, a rival of a native fish?
Queensland
The native rival is the barramundi, which grows to about 1.5 metres.
Q 29Which 2004 Hubert Sauper film exposed the arms-for-fish trade around the lake's perch?
Darwin's Nightmare
It showed cargo planes flying in weapons from Europe and flying out fillets.
Q 30At their early-1990s peak, roughly how many tonnes of perch were landed from Lake Victoria each year?
500,000
Sales of the fish to the EU reached 169 million euros in 2003.