Africa Capitals Quiz

A four-pass method for learning all 54 African capitals

Fifty-four is too many to attack as one undifferentiated list. The failure mode is predictable: people learn the first dozen well, the middle twenty vaguely and the last twenty not at all, because every revision session starts at Algeria and runs out of attention somewhere around Mali. Break the continent into blocks small enough to reach fluency in one sitting, then rehearse them in rotation. The African Union's five regional groupings split the 54 into workable pieces: six countries in North Africa, fifteen in West Africa, nine in Central Africa, fourteen in East Africa and ten in Southern Africa.

Pass one is North Africa, deliberately the easy pass because it builds momentum. Algeria answers Algiers, Tunisia answers Tunis, Libya answers Tripoli, Egypt answers Cairo, Morocco answers Rabat, Mauritania answers Nouakchott. Several share a name with their country or are rehearsed often enough to need no work at all. That leaves two real items: Rabat, which trips people who expect Casablanca, and Nouakchott, which is simply unfamiliar.

Pass two is West Africa, the block that decides your score. Fifteen countries, most unfamiliar outside the region, and the densest cluster of similar-sounding city names on the continent. Split it into three sub-blocks, learned geographically rather than alphabetically. The Atlantic bulge, north to south: Dakar (Senegal), Banjul (Gambia), Bissau (Guinea-Bissau), Conakry (Guinea), Freetown (Sierra Leone), Monrovia (Liberia). The Gulf of Guinea coast, west to east: Yamoussoukro (Cote d'Ivoire), Accra (Ghana), Lome (Togo), Porto-Novo (Benin), Abuja (Nigeria). Then the Sahel interior plus the one island state: Bamako (Mali), Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), Niamey (Niger), Praia (Cabo Verde). Six, five, four: each sub-block is a single ten-minute session.

Pass three covers Central and East Africa together, twenty-three countries. Central Africa is a compact nine dominated by the Congo basin, with two capitals facing each other across the same river. East Africa is fourteen and holds most of the continent's island nations, so it splits into a mainland run (Khartoum, Juba, Asmara, Djibouti, Addis Ababa, Mogadishu, Nairobi, Kampala, Kigali, Dodoma) and an Indian Ocean run (Moroni, Victoria, Port Louis, Antananarivo). Pass four is Southern Africa's ten, the friendliest block after North Africa, because Pretoria, Harare, Lusaka and Maputo are widely known.

Once all four passes are in place, switch the direction of the drill. Being shown Zimbabwe and producing Harare is a different skill from being shown Harare and producing Zimbabwe, and the quiz only exercises the first. Because each question keeps the country highlighted on the map while you choose, you also build shape and position recall. Spacing matters more than volume: four short sessions across four days beat one long one.

The capitals that are not their country's biggest city

Africa has an unusually high number of capitals that are not the country's best-known city, and they are the single largest source of wrong answers in this quiz. Two stories recur. The first is a purpose-built or deliberately neutral capital, created inland to escape a crowded colonial port or to sit where no single region could claim it. The second is an official capital that kept the constitutional title while the money, the ministries and the population quietly stayed somewhere else.

Nigeria is the textbook case. Construction of Abuja began in 1979 on a site at the geographic midpoint of the country, chosen as neutral ground between the major regions; the detailed urban design was the work of the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange. The formal transfer of capital status from Lagos took place on 12 December 1991. Cote d'Ivoire followed similar logic with a personal twist: in March 1983 President Felix Houphouet-Boigny made Yamoussoukro, his own birthplace, the political and administrative capital, while Abidjan kept the designation of economic capital and nearly all commercial life.

Tanzania's move has been the slowest. The decision to shift the capital from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma followed a nationwide party referendum and was announced in 1974; Dodoma became the official capital in 1996, but the office of the president and the ministry headquarters only completed their move, to the Mtumba area of the city, in October 2019. Burundi's change is recent enough to catch out older atlases: President Pierre Nkurunziza announced on 24 December 2018 that Gitega would become the capital, and parliament voted it through on 16 January 2019. Bujumbura remains the economic capital. Malawi moved earlier, replacing Zomba with Lilongwe in 1975, though the last government offices did not relocate until 2005; Blantyre is still the commercial capital, though Lilongwe is now the largest city too.

The other group is the split-function capitals. Benin's official capital is Porto-Novo, where the national legislature sits, but the presidency and most government institutions sit in the larger city of Cotonou. Morocco's capital is Rabat, made the seat of administration in 1912 under the French protectorate in place of Fez and confirmed at independence in 1956, while Casablanca remains by far the bigger metropolis. Cameroon answers Yaounde, a city of more than 2.8 million that is nonetheless second in size to the port of Douala. South Africa answers Pretoria, even though Johannesburg is larger and Cape Town hosts parliament.

The practical rule is that the answer is the official capital, not the largest city and not the commercial hub. If you find yourself reaching for Lagos, Abidjan, Dar es Salaam, Bujumbura, Blantyre, Cotonou, Casablanca, Douala or Johannesburg, you are reaching for the distractor the question was built around.

Confusable pairs and the one detail that separates each

West Africa's B-cluster is the worst offender: Bamako, Bangui, Banjul, Bissau and Brazzaville all begin the same way. Attach one hook to each and they stop blurring. Bissau is the capital of Guinea-Bissau, so the country name contains the answer. Banjul is Gambia's, on St Mary's Island where the Gambia River meets the Atlantic, and was called Bathurst until 24 April 1973. Bamako is Mali's, on the Niger River. Bangui is the Central African Republic's, on the Ubangi River, which echoes the city name. Brazzaville belongs to the Republic of the Congo and is named after the explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza.

The N-cluster is nearly as bad: Niamey, N'Djamena, Nouakchott and Nairobi. Niamey goes with Niger; the first two letters match. N'Djamena is Chad's, renamed from Fort-Lamy on 6 April 1973 by President Francois Tombalbaye as part of his Africanisation programme. Nouakchott is Mauritania's, and its story is the memorable one: construction began in March 1958 on a small fortified fishing village, planned for around 15,000 residents; the 2023 census counted roughly 1.45 million people, about a third of the country's population. Nairobi, the familiar one, belongs to Kenya.

Three separate countries carry the word Guinea, and they take three different capitals. Guinea answers Conakry. Guinea-Bissau answers Bissau. Equatorial Guinea answers Malabo, which is not on the African mainland at all but on the north coast of Bioko island, in the Gulf of Guinea off the Cameroonian coast. Niger and Nigeria are likewise separate countries with separate capitals, Niamey and Abuja, and confusing them is one of the most common errors on the quiz.

The L-cluster spreads across the south and centre: Luanda (Angola), Lusaka (Zambia), Lilongwe (Malawi), Libreville (Gabon) and Lome (Togo). Libreville is the easiest to lock in because the name is French for free town: it was founded in 1849 as a settlement for fifty-two people freed by the French navy from a slave ship, the direct counterpart of Freetown in Sierra Leone. Lusaka takes its name from a Lenje village headman, Chief Lusaaka, and formally became the capital of Northern Rhodesia in May 1935, replacing Livingstone. For Lilongwe, Malawi is long and thin and the capital has LONG inside it.

Finally, the two southern kingdoms. Maseru is Lesotho's, sitting directly on the South African border on the Caledon, also called the Mohokare; it began as a police camp and became the capital in 1869. Mbabane is Eswatini's executive capital, with a second capital at Lobamba where parliament sits. The tell is that Lesotho is the country wholly enclosed by South Africa, while Eswatini also borders Mozambique and is the one with two capitals. Two other pairs worth naming: Monrovia (Liberia), renamed in 1824 after the sitting United States president James Monroe, against Mogadishu (Somalia); and Kinshasa against Brazzaville, the only place in the world where two national capitals developed on opposite banks of a river, within sight of each other.

Why the list is 54, and what sits just outside it

The 54 in this quiz is the number of African states that hold full membership of the United Nations, the count used by school syllabuses and reference atlases. The African Union has 55 members, because it also seats the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, which claims Western Sahara. Morocco left its predecessor, the OAU, in 1984 in protest at the SADR's admission and joined the AU only in 2017. Since Western Sahara is not a UN member state, neither it nor Laayoune appears here, and the same reasoning excludes Somaliland, which declared independence from Somalia in 1991 and administers itself from Hargeisa without international recognition.

Several inhabited places on the map are excluded for a different reason: they are governed from elsewhere. Mayotte and Reunion are French overseas departments, the Canary Islands and the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla are Spanish, and Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha form a British overseas territory. Mayotte is worth flagging because Comoros claims it, and because the territorial capital of the archipelago sat at Dzaoudzi on Mayotte until 1958, when it moved to Moroni on Grande Comore, also known as Ngazidja.

Then there are countries with more than one capital, where a quiz has to pick one answer. South Africa is the famous case: Pretoria is the executive and administrative capital, Cape Town the legislative capital and seat of parliament, and Bloemfontein the judicial capital, an arrangement dating from the union of 1910. This quiz answers Pretoria, the expected exam answer. Eswatini works the same way on a smaller scale, with Mbabane as the executive capital and Lobamba as the legislative and royal one; the quiz answers Mbabane.

A capitals list is a snapshot of something that keeps moving. Egypt has been building a new seat of government roughly 45 kilometres east of Cairo; fourteen ministries and government entities had relocated there by May 2023, and in November 2025 the project was formally renamed simply The New Capital. Equatorial Guinea has been building an inland capital, Ciudad de la Paz, since the early 2010s; government relocation began in 2017, and a presidential decree of 2 January 2026 designated it the capital while the city is still unfinished. South Sudan announced in September 2011, weeks after independence, that it would build a new capital at Ramciel near the country's geographic centre; that move has never happened.

This quiz uses Cairo, Malabo and Juba, the standard reference answers and the ones marked correct in a classroom. It is worth knowing the transitions exist, because they explain why two sources can disagree and both be defensible: a capital is a political fact rather than a geographical one, which is why capitals change far more often than borders do.

The full 54, grouped by region

North Africa, six countries. Algeria (Algiers), Egypt (Cairo), Libya (Tripoli), Mauritania (Nouakchott), Morocco (Rabat), Tunisia (Tunis). Several give the answer almost for free because city and country share a root. The two that need attention are Morocco, where Rabat beats the more famous Casablanca and where the capital's twentieth-century core and historic town were jointly inscribed by UNESCO in 2012, and Mauritania, which the African Union groups with North Africa despite its Sahelian geography.

West Africa, fifteen countries. Benin (Porto-Novo), Burkina Faso (Ouagadougou), Cabo Verde (Praia), Cote d'Ivoire (Yamoussoukro), Gambia (Banjul), Ghana (Accra), Guinea (Conakry), Guinea-Bissau (Bissau), Liberia (Monrovia), Mali (Bamako), Niger (Niamey), Nigeria (Abuja), Senegal (Dakar), Sierra Leone (Freetown), Togo (Lome). This block contains three of the continent's best-known not-the-largest-city answers, two of the three Guineas, and both halves of the Niger-Nigeria trap. Ouagadougou sounds hardest and is the easiest to retain, because nothing else on the continent sounds like it; it was a seat of the Mossi rulers long before the French made it capital of the Upper Volta territory in 1919.

Central Africa, nine countries. Burundi (Gitega), Cameroon (Yaounde), Central African Republic (Bangui), Chad (N'Djamena), Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville), DR Congo (Kinshasa), Equatorial Guinea (Malabo), Gabon (Libreville), Sao Tome and Principe (Sao Tome). This is the block with the two Congos, and the way to keep them apart is size: Kinshasa, capital of the much larger Democratic Republic of the Congo, was called Leopoldville until 1966 and is now the third-most populous city in Africa and by a wide margin the largest nominally French-speaking urban area anywhere. Brazzaville, across the river, belongs to the smaller Republic of the Congo. Sao Tome and Principe follows the island-state pattern: the capital carries the name of the main island.

East Africa, fourteen countries. Comoros (Moroni), Djibouti (Djibouti), Eritrea (Asmara), Ethiopia (Addis Ababa), Kenya (Nairobi), Madagascar (Antananarivo), Mauritius (Port Louis), Rwanda (Kigali), Seychelles (Victoria), Somalia (Mogadishu), South Sudan (Juba), Sudan (Khartoum), Tanzania (Dodoma), Uganda (Kampala). Djibouti is the one African country whose capital shares its name exactly, a free point. Addis Ababa, founded in 1886 by Emperor Menelik II and Empress Taytu Betul and meaning new flower in Amharic, sits at about 2,355 metres and is the highest capital in Africa as well as the headquarters of the African Union. Asmara, at about 2,325 metres, is second, and in 2017 became the first modernist city to be inscribed by UNESCO in its entirety. Antananarivo, usually shortened to Tana, means city of the thousand.

Southern Africa, ten countries. Angola (Luanda), Botswana (Gaborone), Eswatini (Mbabane), Lesotho (Maseru), Malawi (Lilongwe), Mozambique (Maputo), Namibia (Windhoek), South Africa (Pretoria), Zambia (Lusaka), Zimbabwe (Harare). Two are renamings worth knowing: Maputo was Lourenco Marques until February 1976, and Harare was Salisbury until 18 April 1982, the second anniversary of Zimbabwean independence. Gaborone is the other instructive case, developed as the seat of government in the run-up to independence in 1966 because the protectorate had until then been administered from Mafeking, a town outside its borders in what is now South Africa.

Where to go once you have all 54

The most valuable follow-up is not another quiz but the reverse of this one. Cover the country column of the regional lists above and work upward from the capitals: Praia, Gitega, Windhoek, Asmara. If you can name the country from the city as fast as the city from the country, the knowledge has stopped being a rehearsed sequence.

On the capitals side, the natural next steps are the other map-highlight quizzes on this site, which play exactly the same way. The World Capitals quiz covers 43 major countries across every inhabited continent and includes several African entries. The European Capitals quiz runs to 44 and turns on the Baltic and Balkan confusions. The Middle East Capitals quiz has 16 and overlaps Africa at Egypt, so Cairo is a free answer there. The Spanish Speaking Countries Capitals quiz has 21 and includes one African entry, Equatorial Guinea with Malabo, the only Spanish-speaking capital on the continent.

If you want to work on location rather than naming, switch to a click-mode quiz instead. Those play differently: you are given a place name and click the territory itself on an unlabelled map, so outlines and relative position carry the whole burden. The Latin America map quiz is a clear example on this site, with 20 countries to find. Alternating between the two modes beats repeating either: capitals drilling builds vocabulary, clicking builds spatial memory.

Two practical notes on scoring. Your best score is stored in the browser on the device you played on, so a phone and a laptop keep two separate records, and clearing your browsing data resets it. There is no account to create and nothing to sign up for. Treat a full 54-question round as the test rather than the study: do the block work first, take one scored round, and note only the questions you got wrong. Those misses are almost always concentrated in two or three of the five regional blocks, an obvious target for the next session.