Flags of Africa Quiz
A third of this quiz wears some arrangement of green, yellow and red. Those colours are a history lesson first and a sorting problem second - and the sorting is the part a quiz can teach.
Why the continent is green, yellow and red
The palette is Ethiopia’s, flying there since the 1890s, long before the independence era. When Ghana became independent in 1957 it took the three colours up deliberately, adding a single black star for African freedom, and state after state followed through the 1960s. In this flags of Africa quiz alone, Ghana, Cameroon, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso and Togo all draw on the family – which is precisely why colour alone will not carry you here.
Same three colours, different sentences
Order and ornament do the naming. Mali is the bare upright green-yellow-red; Senegal is the same three bands with a green star dropped into the middle; Guinea runs the sequence the other way, red first. Ghana stacks its bands flat with the black star on the gold, Cameroon centres a gold star on its red, and Togo alternates five green and yellow stripes beneath a red canton. None of these is nameable from palette; every one is nameable from structure. Colours locate the region, geometry names the state.
The ones that opt out
The outliers are gifts. Liberia, settled from the United States in the nineteenth century, models its flag directly on the Stars and Stripes, with eleven stripes and a single white star. Somalia is a lone white star on a light blue field, adopted in 1954 while the territory was under UN trusteeship. Morocco keeps a red field with one green interlaced pentagram, Tunisia sets its crescent and star inside a white disc where Turkey leaves them bare, and Mauritania – green and gold since 1959 – added a red band top and bottom in 2017, so older charts show it without them. When a flag refuses the family palette, it is usually telling you exactly who it is.