Nelson Mandela Trivia
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97 free Nelson Mandela trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Nelson Mandela trivia quiz follows Rolihlahla Mandela from a Thembu village in the Transkei to the presidency of South Africa. The easy questions cover the basics: how long he was in prison, the island where he spent most of it, the year he walked free, the man he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with, the clan name South Africans call him by and the rugby shirt he wore in 1995. From there it moves through his childhood as a herd boy, the teacher who named him Nelson, the arranged marriage he ran away from, the night-watchman job at a gold mine, the law firm he opened with Oliver Tambo and the years he spent as the 'Black Pimpernel'. The harder end covers the Defiance Campaign, the M-Plan, the Treason Trial, Sharpeville and the burnt pass, Umkhonto we Sizwe, the African tour and Haile Selassie, the CIA tip-off, the kaross in court, the 'I Am Prepared to Die' speech, the lime quarry, the smuggled autobiography, Pollsmoor and Victor Verster, the secret talks with Kobie Coetsee, CODESA, the 63% election, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Lockerbie, his three marriages and the 67 minutes of Mandela Day. Every answer was checked against Mandela's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Mahatma Gandhi and South Africa quizzes are natural companions.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many years did Mandela spend in prison?
27
27 years: held from his arrest in August 1962 until February 1990, Mandela spent 18 of them on Robben Island and was refused leave to bury his mother and his eldest son.
Q 02What does Mandela's Xhosa forename, Rolihlahla, colloquially mean?
'Troublemaker'
'Troublemaker' is the colloquial sense of Rolihlahla, literally 'pulling the branch of a tree'; his father chose the name, and Mandela wrote that friends later blamed it for the storms he caused.
Q 03By what clan name is Mandela affectionately known in South Africa?
Madiba
Madiba is Mandela's clan name, taken from an 18th-century chief who was his ancestor; among the Xhosa, using a person's clan name is a mark of respect, which made it the nation's fond way to address him.
Q 04In which village was Mandela born on 18 July 1918?
Mvezo
Mvezo, a village on the Mbashe River, is where his father Gadla was chief until he was deposed; his mother then moved to the village where Mandela spent his boyhood.
Q 05To which royal family did Mandela belong?
The Thembu
Mandela belonged to the Thembu royal family through its Ixhiba or 'Left-Hand House', a branch of hereditary royal councillors that was ineligible for the throne.
Q 06What was Mandela's job from about the age of five?
Herd-boy
Herd-boy was his job from about five, looking after sheep and calves, when he learned the Xhosa's deep attachment to cattle; his father had four wives, and his mother, the third, kept her own homestead.
Q 07After his father's death, Mandela was entrusted to the guardianship of which regent?
Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo
Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo, the acting regent, became Mandela's guardian after his father's death and raised him at the Great Place at Mqhekezweni alongside his own children.
Q 08Which two sports did Mandela pursue in his spare time at Healdtown college?
Long-distance running and boxing
Long-distance running and boxing filled his spare time at Healdtown, where he became a prefect; of boxing he later wrote that he enjoyed 'the science of it' more than the violence.
Q 09At which university did Mandela begin a BA in 1939, only to leave without finishing it there?
Fort Hare
Mandela enrolled at the University of Fort Hare in 1939 but was sent home in 1940 after a dispute over the Students' Representative Council, and finished his BA by correspondence instead.
Q 10Why did Mandela and his cousin flee to Johannesburg?
The regent had arranged marriages for them
The regent had arranged marriages for them, so in 1941 Mandela and his cousin Justice ran away; in Johannesburg he worked as a mine night watchman until the headman learned he was a runaway and dismissed him.
Q 11Which ANC activist and realtor got Mandela his first job as an articled clerk at a Johannesburg law firm?
Walter Sisulu
Walter Sisulu, who ran an estate agency, took Mandela to Lazar Sidelsky, a liberal lawyer with an interest in African education, whose firm Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman agreed to article him.
Q 12Which organisation did Mandela help found in 1944, with Anton Lembede as first president?
The ANC Youth League
The ANC Youth League was formed in 1944 at Johannesburg's Bantu Men's Social Centre to push the ANC toward mass action; Mandela sat on its first executive, and its Programme of Action became party policy in 1949.
Q 13Through which university did Mandela earn his law degree in 1989, while still a prisoner?
Q 21What nickname did the press give Mandela while he travelled incognito in 1961?
The Black Pimpernel
The press dubbed him 'the Black Pimpernel' for evading police while travelling in disguise, a nod to Baroness Orczy's 1905 novel The Scarlet Pimpernel.
Q 22What does Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed group Mandela co-founded in 1961, mean?
'Spear of the Nation'
'Spear of the Nation' is the meaning of Umkhonto we Sizwe, or MK, which announced itself with a series of bombings on 16 December 1961, aimed at installations rather than people.
Q 23Where in Rivonia did Mandela hide with MK comrades in 1961?
Liliesleaf Farm
University of South Africa
University of South Africa awarded Mandela his LLB in 1989, in his last months in prison; he had left Wits without the degree and never completed the University of London course he began after his 1962 arrest.
Q 14What title did Mandela hold in the 1952 Defiance Campaign, signing up people to break apartheid laws?
Volunteer-in-Chief
Volunteer-in-Chief was his post: he toured the country enlisting defiers and was arrested himself, and ANC membership swelled from about 20,000 to 100,000 during the campaign.
Q 15Mandela's 1953 speech 'No Easy Walk to Freedom' took its title from a quote by whom?
Jawaharlal Nehru
The title quoted Jawaharlal Nehru's line that there is 'no easy walk to freedom anywhere'; Mandela's 1953 presidential address to the Transvaal ANC was read out for him because he was banned.
Q 16With whom did Mandela open South Africa's only firm of African lawyers in the early 1950s?
Oliver Tambo
Oliver Tambo joined him at Chancellor House in Johannesburg, where Mandela and Tambo took on a stream of police-brutality cases; the authorities then used the Group Areas Act to order the firm out of the city centre.
Q 17The 1955 Freedom Charter was adopted at the Congress of the People, held in which place near Johannesburg?
Kliptown
Kliptown, outside Johannesburg, hosted the Congress of the People on 25-26 June 1955; Mandela, banned from gatherings, watched in secret before police broke the meeting up.
Q 18Whom did Mandela marry in Bizana in June 1958?
Winnie Madikizela
Winnie Madikizela, a social worker, married Mandela in Bizana on 14 June 1958; she later endured imprisonment and banishment, and the couple separated in 1992.
Q 19How did the Treason Trial, which began in 1956, end for Mandela in March 1961?
Not guilty
All the accused, Mandela included, were found not guilty on 29 March 1961; the judges ruled the prosecution had not proved the ANC planned violent revolution or was communist.
Q 20Where did police shoot dead 69 protesters, by the official count, in March 1960?
Sharpeville
Sharpeville: police fired on a crowd protesting the pass laws on 21 March 1960; Mandela burned his own pass in solidarity, and within weeks the government banned the ANC.
Mandela lived at Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia from October 1961, posing as a farmhand; the police raid there on 11 July 1963 seized the documents that led to the Rivonia Trial.
Q 24Which emperor did Mandela meet in 1962 while touring Africa in secret?
Haile Selassie
Mandela met Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa in February 1962 while addressing a pan-African conference; he later began guerrilla training in Ethiopia before being recalled home.
Q 25Which foreign spy agency reportedly tipped off South African police before Mandela's 1962 arrest?
The CIA
The CIA feared Mandela's communist links, said Donald Rickard, a former American diplomat who later claimed it had told the police where to find him; he was arrested near Howick on 5 August 1962.
Q 26What did Mandela wear to disrupt his 1962 hearing in Pretoria?
A traditional kaross
Mandela entered the Pretoria court in a traditional kaross, a leopard-skin cloak, to stress that he was a black African in a white man's court; he was sentenced to five years.
Q 27What is Mandela's Rivonia Trial speech called?
I Am Prepared to Die
'I Am Prepared to Die' comes from its closing line; Mandela spoke from the dock rather than the witness box, where he would have faced cross-examination.
Q 28What penalty did Mandela and his co-accused expect at the Rivonia Trial before the judge imposed life?
The death sentence
The death sentence was the maximum penalty for sabotage, and Mandela wrote that he told his lawyers he would not appeal against it; Judge Quartus de Wet instead gave him and seven co-accused life imprisonment on 12 June 1964.
Q 29What did Mandela first sleep on in his Robben Island cell?
A mat on the floor
A mat on the floor was his bed; he wrote that he could cross the cell in three paces, and that lying down his feet touched one wall while his head grazed the other.
Q 30As a Class D prisoner, how often was Mandela initially allowed a visit and a letter?
Once every six months
Classified in the lowest category, Class D, Mandela was allowed a visit and a letter only once every six months, and every letter was heavily censored by the authorities.