The Africa Quiz

The whole continent, Maghreb to Cape, and easy to misplace. This pack draws from 87 real places, and the quiz is not multiple choice: you get an unlabelled 3D globe, the name of a place, and 10 seconds to pin where it is. Points scale with how close you land and how fast you commit, so a near miss beats a wild stab and knowing beats guessing.

Africa is bigger than you think, and that is the whole problem

Africa is the second-largest continent, and on most world maps it looks smaller than Greenland, which is wrong by a factor of fourteen. The Mercator projection stretches the high latitudes and shrinks the equator, so Africa, which straddles the equator, appears deceptively compact. This pack punishes that illusion. The distance from Cairo to Cape Town is over six thousand kilometres, and a confident "somewhere in Africa" guess that lands on the wrong end of that line is a miss no partial credit rescues. The single most valuable habit here is asking which Africa a clue means: the Mediterranean north, the Sahel, the equatorial belt, or the southern cone, because they are four different maps.

The continent also tilts. The highlands sit in the east and south, which is why so many African rivers run outward from the interior, and why the capitals of the Great Lakes region, Kampala, Kigali, Bujumbura, sit on upland plateaus rather than on the hot lowland coast. The relief, more than the borders, tells you where a place belongs.

Four bands that sort the continent

The Mediterranean shore. Cairo, Alexandria, Tunis, Algiers, Tripoli, Rabat and Casablanca all sit on the northern coast, between roughly 30 and 37 degrees north. They share a latitude with the southern United States, not with the equator, so the reflex that puts Africa in the tropics costs you a thousand kilometres here. The ancient sites, Carthage, Leptis Magna, Cyrene, Volubilis, all hug this same shore.

The Sahel and the desert. Timbuktu, Agadez, Gao and Nouakchott sit on the southern edge of the Sahara, in a band that runs east-west at roughly 15 to 20 degrees north. The Sahara itself, the largest hot desert in the world, fills the gap between the Mediterranean shore and the Sahel, and it is a feature in its own pack. If a clue is Saharan or Sahelian, the pin belongs in that dry belt, not on the green coast.

The equatorial belt. Lagos, Accra, Abidjan, Yaoundé, Kinshasa and Brazzaville all sit within a few degrees of the equator, on the Gulf of Guinea or in the Congo basin. Nairobi, Kampala and Kigali sit just south of the equator on the eastern highlands. This is the band where Africa actually is tropical, and the latitude is your friend: if the clue is West or Central African and green, aim near the equator and the Gulf of Guinea.

The southern cone. Pretoria, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Maputo, Gaborone, Harare and Windhoek sit south of about 20 degrees south, in a region that shares latitudes with Australia and Argentina. Cape Town, at 34 degrees south, is closer to the equator than Madrid is to the North Pole. The error here is placing southern African cities too far north, in the tropical band where they do not belong. Table Mountain, the Okavango Delta and Victoria Falls are all in this southern third.

What makes an African run hard

The pack mixes capitals with natural wonders and ancient sites, and the confusables are punishing. Kinshasa and Brazzaville face each other across the Congo River, the closest pair of capital cities in the world, and a pin on the wrong bank is a real miss. Dodoma replaced Dar es Salaam as Tanzania's capital, but Dar es Salaam remains the largest city and most players still pin the coast. Abuja replaced Lagos in Nigeria, and the same trap applies. The island nations, Madagascar, the Comoros, Cape Verde, São Tomé, sit offshore and punish anyone who treats Africa as a single landmass. For the full story of why the continent is so widely misplaced and how the projection lies to you, Why Everyone Misplaces Africa covers the projection trap and the latitude bands. For the capitals that moved inland, The Capitals Nobody Guesses traces Abuja and Dodoma.

How a run works

A run is 10 places sampled fresh from the pack each time, timed, and scored server-side onto the pack's own leaderboard. Your best run stands as your entry, and you can grind it down (or up) as long as you like. Free accounts get one ranked run a day; premium is unlimited.

Places you might be asked to pin

• Abidjan · Côte d’Ivoire
• Abu Simbel · Egypt
• Abuja · Nigeria
• Accra · Ghana
• Addis Ababa · Ethiopia
• Agadez · Niger
• Aksum · Ethiopia
• Alexandria · Egypt
• Algiers · Algeria
• Antananarivo · Madagascar

…and 77 more across the pack.

More by region

• The Europe quiz · From Reykjavík to the Caucasus. Every European place in the atlas.
• The Asia quiz · The largest continent, from the Levant to the Pacific rim.
• The The Americas quiz · North and South together, Arctic tundra to Tierra del Fuego.

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