Tanzania Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Tanzania trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Tanzania has Africa's highest mountain, its deepest lake, its greatest wildlife migration and the gorge where the human story was dug up, and this quiz covers all of it: the Haya smiths who forged steel 1,500 years ago, the Swahili city-state of Kilwa, Zanzibar's sultans and slave markets, German East Africa and the Maji Maji rebellion, Tanganyika under Britain, Julius Nyerere and Ujamaa, the 1964 union with Zanzibar and the country's first female president. Easy questions ask for the mountain, the largest city, the national language and the ocean; the harder ones want the man who invented the name 'Tanzania', the war that lasted under 45 minutes, the newspaper contest, the two Nobel and rock legends born in Zanzibar, the gem found nowhere else on Earth, the railway China built to Zambia and the anthem shared with South Africa. There is also the Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Gombe's chimpanzees, bongo flava, Tingatinga painting and Kalambo Falls. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the country, its regions and its history, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Tanzania's coastline lies on which ocean?
Indian
The Indian Ocean washes all 1,424 km of Tanzania's coast; Arab, Persian and Indian traders had built trading cities along it by the 12th century.
Q 02Which mountain in Tanzania is the highest in Africa and the tallest free-standing mountain in the world?
Kilimanjaro
Kilimanjaro, a dormant volcano, tops out at 5,895 metres, but its famous ice cap is vanishing: more than 80% of the ice mapped in 1912 has melted away.
Q 03What is Tanzania's official capital, moved from the coast by a 1970s decision?
Dodoma
Dodoma was chosen in the 1970s because it sits near the centre of the country, but the transfer of government offices from the coast dragged on for decades.
Q 04Who led Tanganyika to independence and served as Tanzania's president until 1985?
Julius Nyerere
Julius Nyerere, known as Mwalimu ('teacher'), took Tanganyika to independence as prime minister in 1961 and three years later merged it with Zanzibar to create Tanzania.
Q 05After independence, Tanzania's highest summit was renamed Uhuru Peak; what does 'uhuru' mean?
Freedom
Freedom is what uhuru means: an Uhuru Torch was lit to mark independence from Britain in 1961, and it became a national symbol.
Q 06The 1967 Arusha Declaration committed Tanzania to an African socialism known by what name?
Ujamaa
Ujamaa, roughly 'familyhood', was the Arusha Declaration's African socialism: collective villages, nationalised banks and industries. The economy had sagged badly by the late 1970s.
Q 07Which European power ruled mainland Tanzania as a colony from 1885 until World War I?
Germany
Germany ruled the mainland as German East Africa until Allied troops overran it during World War I; Britain then governed it as Tanganyika under a League of Nations mandate.
Q 08Which 1905-07 uprising against colonial rule swept southern Tanzania?
The Maji Maji Rebellion
The Maji Maji Rebellion spread across the south in 1905; fighters believed sacred water, maji, would turn bullets to water. Reprisals and famine killed at least 75,000 people.
Q 09Britain's 1896 war with the sultanate of Zanzibar is remembered as what?
The shortest war in history
The Anglo-Zanzibar War is the shortest war in history, lasting roughly 38 to 45 minutes on 27 August 1896; British warships shelled the palace after Khalid bin Barghash seized the throne.
Q 10Which rock star was born Farrokh Bulsara in Stone Town, on the island off Tanzania's coast, in 1946?
Freddie Mercury
Freddie Mercury, Queen's frontman, was born Farrokh Bulsara on 5 September 1946 in Stone Town; his Parsi family fled to England after the 1964 revolution.
Q 11Which Tanzanian-born novelist won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature?
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in Zanzibar in 1948 and author of 'Paradise' and 'By the Sea', won the 2021 Nobel for his writing on colonialism and the fate of refugees.
Q 12Tanzania is home to the world's largest population of which animal?
Lions
Lions have vanished from about 95% of their historic range, which is why Tanzania's vast protected strongholds, among them the Serengeti and Ruaha, now count for so much.
Q 13Which animals star in the great annual migration across the Serengeti plain?
Wildebeest and zebra
Q 21In 1978-79 Tanzania fought a war that ended with the overthrow of which neighbouring dictator?
Idi Amin of Uganda
Idi Amin of Uganda struck first, invading in 1978 and claiming Tanzania's Kagera region; Tanzanian troops and Ugandan exiles then pushed on to Kampala and toppled him.
Q 22Who became Tanzania's first female president in March 2021?
Samia Suluhu Hassan
Samia Suluhu Hassan, born in Zanzibar in 1960, was sworn in on 19 March 2021 after her predecessor died in office, having been vice president since 2015.
Q 23Which party was formed in 1977 by merging TANU with Zanzibar's Afro-Shirazi Party?
Chama Cha Mapinduzi
Wildebeest and zebra, well over a million of the former, travel a clockwise loop of the Serengeti each year, timing their calving for the rain-ripened grass of the southern plains.
Q 14In which Tanzanian park did Jane Goodall begin her study of chimpanzees in 1960?
Gombe Stream
Jane Goodall arrived at Gombe Stream, in western Tanzania, in July 1960; her observation of chimpanzees making tools upended assumptions about what separated humans from other animals.
Q 15The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is named after what kind of geological feature?
A volcanic caldera
A volcanic caldera is what the Ngorongoro Crater is: a giant volcano erupted and collapsed on itself two to three million years ago, leaving the world's largest intact caldera.
Q 16Which family of fossil hunters made Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge famous with their finds of early human remains?
The Leakeys
The Leakeys, Louis and Mary, dug in the gorge for decades; Mary found a celebrated early-human skull there in 1959, and in 1964 Louis announced a new species, Homo habilis.
Q 17Which jeweller named the gemstone tanzanite after its only source and launched it in 1968?
Tiffany & Co.
Tiffany & Co. decided the mineral's own name, zoisite, would not sell, so it named the gem for Tanzania, still the only country where it is mined.
Q 18On Tanzania's flag, a gold-edged black band separates a green triangle from one of what colour?
Light blue
Light blue stands for the country's lakes, rivers and sea; the 1964 flag blends the colours of the old Tanganyika and Zanzibar flags, with gold edging for mineral wealth.
Q 19Tanzania's national anthem is a Swahili version of which hymn, which is also part of South Africa's anthem?
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, written by Enoch Sontonga in 1897, spread north as a liberation hymn; Tanzania sings it in Swahili as 'Mungu ibariki Afrika', and Zambia borrowed the tune.
Q 20Which country financed and built the TAZARA railway from Tanzania to Zambia in the 1970s?
China
China financed and built the 1,860 km TAZARA line between 1970 and 1975, giving landlocked Zambia a route to the sea that bypassed white-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa.
Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the 'Party of the Revolution', was created on 5 February 1977, and it governed as the sole legal party until multi-party politics was legalised in 1992.
Q 24More than 1,500 years ago the Haya people of north-western Tanzania built furnaces that forged what?
Carbon steel
The Haya smelted carbon steel in tall charcoal furnaces roughly 2,000 years ago, using preheated air blown through clay tuyeres; archaeologists reported temperatures above 1,800 °C.
Q 25Which medieval Swahili city-state on Tanzania's coast grew rich on the gold trade from Sofala?
Kilwa
Kilwa Kisiwani, an island city-state on the southern coast, minted its own coins, controlled the Sofala gold trade and dominated the Swahili coast until the Portuguese sacked it in 1505.
Q 26The sultan of which country moved his capital to Zanzibar in the 19th century?
Oman
Oman's ruler Said bin Sultan shifted his court from Muscat to Zanzibar, which grew into the centre of the East African slave trade.
Q 27Which explorer did Henry Morton Stanley track down at Ujiji, in today's Tanzania, in 1871?
David Livingstone
David Livingstone had been out of touch with the outside world for years when a US newspaper sent Stanley to find him; Stanley reported greeting him with 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'
Q 28Tanzania is the most populous African country located entirely where?
South of the equator
Tanzania lies entirely south of the equator, between about 1°S and 12°S; with roughly 67 million people in 2024 it had outgrown South Africa, the next-largest wholly southern-hemisphere country.
Q 29Which of Africa's Great Lakes on Tanzania's border is the continent's deepest?
Lake Tanganyika
Lake Tanganyika is the world's second-deepest lake after Siberia's Baikal; Richard Burton and John Speke reached it in 1858 while hunting for the headwaters of the Nile.
Q 30Which Tanzanian soda lake is East Africa's only regular breeding site for lesser flamingos?
Lake Natron
Lake Natron, a caustic soda lake below Ol Doinyo Lengai, is the only regular breeding ground of East Africa's lesser flamingos; its high alkalinity keeps predators away from the nests.