Nigeria Trivia
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100 free Nigeria trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Nigeria is Africa's most populous country, home to more than 240 million people, 250 ethnic groups and 500 languages, the continent's biggest city, its second-largest film industry in the world and the music that now fills global charts. This quiz covers the geography (Lagos and Abuja, the Niger and Benue, the Delta, Chappal Waddi, the 36 states), the pre-colonial states (Nok, Nri, Ife, Oyo, Benin, Kanem-Bornu and the Sokoto Caliphate), and the modern history from Flora Shaw's coining of the name and Lugard's 1914 amalgamation through independence on 1 October 1960, the coups of 1966, Biafra, the oil boom, Abacha and the return of democracy in 1999. Culture gets its due: Nollywood and Living in Bondage, Fela Kuti's Afrobeat and today's Afrobeats stars, jollof rice and the rivalry with Ghana, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka's Nobel, Nigerian Pidgin, the Super Eagles' Olympic gold in Atlanta, the green-white-green flag designed by a student and the anthem restored in 2024. Easy questions ask which city is largest; hard ones want the year Abuja became capital and the battle where Ibadan halted the Sokoto jihad. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Nigeria, Lagos, Abuja, Nollywood, Fela Kuti, jollof rice, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, the flag and the national football team, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital of Nigeria?
Abuja
Abuja was planned from scratch in the middle of the country, on a site picked because every region could reach it, and took over from the old coastal capital in December 1991.
Q 02Which currency replaced the pound as Nigeria's money in 1973?
The naira
The naira, its name a clipping of 'Nigeria', arrived in 1973 when the country decimalised its money and dropped the colonial-style pound for a unit split into 100 kobo.
Q 03As of 2025, Nigeria is Africa's most populous country and ranks where in the world?
Sixth
Sixth, behind India, China, the US, Indonesia and Pakistan: birth rates have stayed high while child deaths have fallen sharply, so the population grows by several million every year.
Q 04How many states make up the Nigerian federation, alongside the Federal Capital Territory?
36
36 states is where the map settled in 1996: military rulers kept redrawing it by decree, first turning the old regions into 12 states in 1967 and then adding more four times over.
Q 05Which are the three largest of Nigeria's more than 250 ethnic groups?
Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo
Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo each dominated one of the three regions Nigeria was divided into at independence, a three-way split that shaped the new country's politics.
Q 06What is the official language of Nigeria?
English
English came with British rule and stayed on as the language of government, business and school, while its creole cousin, Nigerian Pidgin, became the everyday common tongue of tens of millions.
Q 07Who coined the name Nigeria in 1897?
Journalist Flora Shaw
Journalist Flora Shaw proposed 'Nigeria', after the River Niger, in The Times because 'Royal Niger Company Territories' was too much of a mouthful; five years later she married the territory's British governor.
Q 08Which ancient culture of central Nigeria made its famous terracotta figures more than 2,000 years ago?
Nok
Nok takes its name from the small tin-mining village where the first of its terracottas was dug up by accident in 1928.
Q 09The priest-kings of Nri held sway over which people of south-eastern Nigeria into the 20th century?
The Igbo
The Igbo looked to the eze Nri as a priest-king who ruled by ritual rather than force, and the bronzes found at Igbo-Ukwu may come from the burial of one of his forerunners.
Q 10Which Yoruba holy city is famed for its naturalistic bronze and terracotta heads?
Ile Ife
Ile Ife is where Yoruba tradition says the world began; its heads were so lifelike that Leo Frobenius, the German who collected some in 1910, insisted a lost colony of ancient Greeks must have made them.
Q 11Usman dan Fodio's jihad against the Hausa kingdoms in the early 19th century established what?
The Sokoto Caliphate
The Sokoto Caliphate took shape when the followers of Usman dan Fodio, a Fulani preacher who had fallen out with the rulers of Gobir, elected him Commander of the Faithful and went to war in his name.
Q 12Which Yoruba city holds the sacred grove of the river goddess Osun, a UNESCO World Heritage Site?
Osogbo
Osogbo is also where foot soldiers from Ibadan routed the Fulani cavalry around 1840, the battle that stopped the northern jihad from pushing any deeper into Yorubaland.
Q 13British troops burned which kingdom's capital in 1897 and carried off thousands of its royal brass plaques and sculptures?
Benin
Q 21Which body did Nigeria join in 1971, eleven years after independence?
OPEC
OPEC took Nigeria in two years before the 1973 price surge; the oil money that followed drew people off the land, and a country that once exported palm oil and peanuts was soon importing rice.
Q 22Which Nigerian military ruler was the first to hand power to an elected civilian government?
Olusegun Obasanjo
Olusegun Obasanjo handed over to the elected Shehu Shagari in 1979; jailed in 1995 by a later military regime, he walked free in 1998 and within a year had won the presidency himself as a civilian.
Q 23Which dictator's regime hanged writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995?
Sani Abacha
Benin's palace treasures, the work of royal guilds of brass casters, were shipped to Britain and sold on to museums; in 2022 Germany agreed to return more than 1,000 of them to Nigeria and began handing them back.
Q 14Which British administrator conquered northern Nigeria by 1903 and merged north and south into one colony in 1914?
Frederick Lugard
Frederick Lugard left local government in the hands of the north's traditional rulers under British guidance, the system that became known as indirect rule, and was the merged country's first governor-general.
Q 15Which Nigerian was the first woman to lead the World Trade Organization?
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala made her name at home by negotiating a deal with creditor nations that wiped out $30 billion of Nigeria's debt, $18 billion of it cancelled outright.
Q 16Nigeria became independent on which date?
1 October 1960
On 1 October 1960 Nigeria became independent, yet Elizabeth II stayed on as head of state, as Queen of Nigeria: the country only became a republic, with its own president, exactly three years later.
Q 17Who was Nigeria's first prime minister at independence?
Abubakar Tafawa Balewa
Abubakar Tafawa Balewa led independent Nigeria for just over five years: in January 1966 he was overthrown and killed in the first of Nigeria's military coups.
Q 18Which part of Nigeria declared itself the independent Republic of Biafra in May 1967?
The East
The East, formally the Eastern Region, was declared independent by its military governor after massacres in the north in 1966 sent about a million of its people fleeing home as refugees.
Q 19Which army officer led breakaway Biafra through the 1967–70 civil war?
Odumegwu Ojukwu
Odumegwu Ojukwu, an Oxford history graduate, flew to Ivory Coast on the eve of Biafra's surrender in January 1970 and came home only in 1982, after a presidential pardon.
Q 20Which two powers were the main arms suppliers to Nigeria's federal government during the civil war?
The UK and the Soviet Union
The UK and the Soviet Union, rivals in the Cold War, found themselves arming the same side, while France supplied weapons to breakaway Biafra.
Sani Abacha's regime hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight fellow Ogoni activists who had campaigned against oil pollution of their homeland; in response the Commonwealth suspended Nigeria's membership.
Q 24Whose 1993 presidential election win did Nigeria's military annul?
Moshood Abiola
Moshood Abiola was arrested in 1994 after proclaiming himself president and died in custody four years later; the election date, 12 June, is now Nigeria's Democracy Day in his honour.
Q 25Which Islamist group kidnapped the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014?
Boko Haram
Boko Haram seized 276 girls from their boarding school in a single night; the outcry, under the banner #BringBackOurGirls, went worldwide and brought Nigeria offers of foreign help in the search.
Q 26Who was inaugurated as Nigeria's president on 29 May 2023?
Bola Tinubu
Bola Tinubu had fled into exile in the 1990s as a pro-democracy campaigner against military rule; nearly three decades on he won the presidency with just under 37 percent of the vote.
Q 27In 2024 Nigeria reinstated which national anthem, used from 1960 to 1978?
We Hail Thee
We Hail Thee has words by Lillian Jean Williams, a British expatriate living in Nigeria at independence; it was dropped in 1978 for an anthem written by Nigerians, then brought back by act of parliament in 2024.
Q 28What is the highest point in Nigeria, a 2,419-metre peak on the border with Cameroon?
Chappal Waddi
Chappal Waddi stands where the Cameroon Highlands spill across the border, the most mountainous corner of a country that is otherwise mostly plains and plateaus.
Q 29Which two great rivers meet at Lokoja in central Nigeria before flowing south to the delta?
The Niger and the Benue
The Niger and the Benue meet at Lokoja, where the Benue, the larger river's greatest tributary, roughly doubles its flow; British merchants set up a trading post at the confluence in the 1850s.
Q 30Which Nigerian-born centre, nicknamed 'The Dream', led the Houston Rockets to back-to-back NBA titles in 1994 and 1995?
Hakeem Olajuwon
Hakeem Olajuwon grew up as a football goalkeeper and handball player and never played basketball until he was 15; the footwork he learned in goal became the basis of his game.