Uganda Trivia
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48 free Uganda trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Uganda is the country Winston Churchill called the Pearl of Africa, and this quiz covers it from the kingdoms of the Great Lakes to the present: Kitara and Bunyoro, the Kabakas of Buganda, the Uganda Martyrs, the 1894 protectorate and the railway built by Indian labourers, independence in 1962, Milton Obote, Idi Amin's eight brutal years and the raid on Entebbe, the war with Tanzania, and Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1986. Easy questions ask for the capital, the great lake, the river that rises there and the national bird; the harder ones want the highest peak, the meaning of the country's name, the number of refugees it hosts, the omelette wrapped in a chapati, the runner who broke the 5,000m and 10,000m world records and the hurdler who won Uganda's first Olympic gold. There is also Bwindi's mountain gorillas, matoke, the five traditional kingdoms, the world's youngest population, Bobi Wine and the Cranes. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the country, its cities and its history, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country borders Uganda to the east?
Kenya
Kenya's west was once Uganda's east: in 1902 Britain moved the border and handed Uganda's entire Eastern Province to the neighbouring territory that became Kenya.
Q 02Uganda shares which lake, the world's second-largest freshwater lake, with two neighbours?
Victoria
Lake Victoria is second in area only to Lake Superior among freshwater lakes; Nile perch released into it in the 1950s have since eaten their way through its native cichlid fish.
Q 03Which British statesman visited in 1907 and dubbed Uganda the 'Pearl of Africa'?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill toured the country decades before he became prime minister and called it 'the pearl of Africa'; in 'My African Journey' he wrote that in Uganda 'you climb up a railway instead of a beanstalk'.
Q 04Which kingdom, whose king is the Kabaka, covers much of southern Uganda including Kampala?
Buganda
Buganda, the kingdom of the Baganda people, is ruled by the Kabaka; its language, Luganda, is widely spoken, and Britain rewarded its help against Bunyoro with Bunyoro's 'lost counties'.
Q 05Who was head of state when Uganda became independent?
Elizabeth II
Queen Elizabeth II stayed on as Queen of Uganda, represented by a governor-general, until 1963, when the country cut the link and chose Kabaka Mutesa II as its first president.
Q 06Forest Whitaker won an Oscar for playing Idi Amin in which 2006 film?
The Last King of Scotland
The Last King of Scotland takes its title from one of Amin's own boasts: among the grand titles he awarded himself, he claimed to be the uncrowned king of Scotland.
Q 07Idi Amin gave which group 90 days to leave Uganda?
Its Asian minority
Its Asian minority, the families who dominated the country's trade, lost their firms, farms and homes to confiscation, and the economy they had largely run slid into collapse.
Q 08In July 1976 Israeli commandos rescued hostages from a hijacked Air France plane at which airport?
Entebbe
Entebbe's old terminal held the hostages until Israeli commandos flew some 4,000 km to free them; the only soldier they lost was their commander, Yonatan Netanyahu, brother of a future Israeli prime minister.
Q 09Idi Amin was overthrown in 1979 by an invasion from which neighbouring country to the south?
Tanzania
Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere sent his army north after the Kagera region was invaded in October 1978; Kampala fell on 11 April 1979 and the dictator fled to Libya.
Q 10Which leader's rebel forces took Kampala in January 1986, making him president of Uganda?
Yoweri Museveni
Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army took Kampala in January 1986 after a bush war begun in 1981; parliament scrapped presidential term limits in 2005 and the age limit in 2017.
Q 11Which pop star ran for president of Uganda in 2021 and officially took about 35% of the vote?
Bobi Wine
Bobi Wine, born Robert Kyagulanyi, grew up in a Kampala slum and sang his way into parliament in 2017; he rejected the 2021 count, which gave him about 35 per cent, as rigged.
Q 12Which bird appears in the white disc at the centre of Uganda's black, yellow and red flag?
The crested crane
The crested crane was already Uganda's colonial badge, picked by the British because it belonged to no single region or kingdom; a first flag design in green and blue was dropped when the government changed just before independence.
Q 13Uganda's highest peak, Mount Stanley, lies in which range on the DR Congo border?
The Rwenzori
Q 21John Akii-Bua won Uganda's first Olympic gold in 1972 as the first man under 48 seconds in which event?
400m hurdles
The 400m hurdles final put Akii-Bua in the tight inside lane, yet he won in a world-record 47.82 seconds and kept going, hurdling his way around a lap of honour.
Q 22Which Ugandan set 5,000 m and 10,000 m world records and won 10,000 m gold at Paris 2024?
Joshua Cheptegei
Joshua Cheptegei went to the Tokyo Games as world record holder and was beaten to silver in the 10,000 m; three years later in Paris he finally took the title, in Olympic record time.
Q 23Stephen Kiprotich won which event for Uganda at the 2012 Olympics?
Marathon
The Rwenzori, thought to be the 'Mountains of the Moon' of the ancient geographer Ptolemy, are not volcanoes like most of Africa's snow peaks: a block of crust was thrust up here, high enough to carry glaciers.
Q 14Which Ugandan national park is famous for its population of mountain gorillas?
Bwindi Impenetrable
Bwindi Impenetrable shelters about half of the world's mountain gorillas; when the forest was made a national park, the Batwa people who had long lived and foraged in it were evicted.
Q 15The Ugandan town of Jinja, on the shore of a great lake, is celebrated as the location of what?
The source of the Nile
The source of the Nile was fixed here in 1862, when John Hanning Speke watched the river pour out of the lake over Ripon Falls; a hydroelectric dam finished in 1954 drowned the falls.
Q 16Which Ugandan waterfall forces the whole Nile through a rock gap less than ten metres wide?
Murchison Falls
Murchison Falls nearly cost Ernest Hemingway his life: in 1954 the plane taking him to photograph the falls hit a pole and crash-landed nearby, the first of two crashes he survived on that trip.
Q 17As of 2024, about a million of the refugees in Uganda, its largest group, had fled which country?
South Sudan
South Sudan's civil war sent about a million people across the border; Uganda gives refugees plots of land and the right to work, and in 2024 it hosted more of them than any other African country.
Q 18Uganda's two official languages are English and which other?
Swahili
Swahili was made the second official language in 2005 as the shared tongue of East Africa, even though Luganda is far more widely spoken inside Uganda.
Q 19The Ugandan street food called a 'Rolex' consists of what?
An omelette rolled in a chapati
An omelette rolled in a chapati, often with chopped vegetables, is one of Uganda's best-known street foods; the name is said to be a play on 'rolled eggs'.
Q 20Matoke, one of Uganda's staple foods and a national dish, is made from what?
Steamed green bananas
Steamed green bananas make matoke: the fruit is picked unripe, peeled, wrapped in banana leaves and steamed until it is soft enough to mash.
The marathon came on the final day of the 2012 Games: Kiprotich finished ahead of two Kenyans to win Uganda's only medal there and its first Olympic gold in 40 years.
Q 24The 2016 Disney film Queen of Katwe follows a girl from a Kampala slum who becomes a champion at what?
Chess
Chess: Phiona Mutesi, who sold maize in a street market as a child, followed her brother to a mission's after-school programme, learned the game there and went on to play for Uganda at four Olympiads.
Q 25Britain governed Uganda from 1894 under which status?
A protectorate
A protectorate was declared in 1894 after the chartered company that had been running the territory ran out of money; the status left local rulers more self-government than a colony would have.
Q 26The Uganda Martyrs, executed in 1885-86, were killed on the orders of which Kabaka?
Mwanga II
Kabaka Mwanga II had 45 Anglican and Catholic converts killed between 1885 and 1887, most burned at Namugongo on 3 June 1886, observed as Martyrs' Day in Uganda.
Q 27Labourers from which British territory built the Uganda Railway in the 1890s?
British India
British India supplied the contract labourers for the line; in 1898 two man-eating lions stalked their camps at Tsavo for months and are said to have killed dozens before a British officer shot them.
Q 28Which virus is named after the Ugandan forest where scientists first isolated it from a monkey in 1947?
Zika
Zika is the name of a forest where yellow fever researchers kept caged monkeys in the treetops; the virus found there in 1947 stayed in a narrow tropical belt for decades before reaching the Americas in the 2015 epidemic.
Q 29Which rebel group led by Joseph Kony waged a long war in northern Uganda marked by child abductions?
The Lord's Resistance Army
The Lord's Resistance Army filled its ranks with abducted children, forced to fight and to carry its loads; in 2005 its commanders became the first people ever indicted by the International Criminal Court.
Q 30Which city, the main urban centre of northern Uganda, was the hub of the region's two-decade insurgency?
Gulu
Gulu was the heart of the war zone: thousands of children known as 'night commuters' walked into the city every evening to sleep where the rebels could not abduct them.