Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jugurtha was a king of Numidia, the ancient North African kingdom occupying territory roughly corresponding to modern eastern Algeria, parts of western Tunisia, and western Libya. He rose to sole power after eliminating his co-heirs and ruled until his capture in 105 BC. He died in 104 BC.
The Jugurthine War began because Jugurtha killed his co-ruler Adherbal in 112 BC despite Roman wishes, and then massacred Roman residents at Cirta. Widespread anger in Rome over Jugurtha's repeated bribing of Roman officials and senators also made war politically unavoidable.
Jugurtha was betrayed by his own father-in-law, Bocchus I of Mauretania, in 105 BC. The Roman quaestor Sulla traveled to Mauretania and negotiated the handover; Bocchus agreed to surrender Jugurtha in exchange for an extension of his territory west into Numidia as far as the Mulucha River.
Jugurtha was executed in Rome in 104 BC, most likely by strangulation, in the Tullianum prison. Before his imprisonment he was paraded through Rome as part of Gaius Marius' triumph, during which his royal robes were stripped and his earrings were forcibly ripped out, tearing off part of an ear lobe.
The name Jugurtha connects to the Libyco-Berber word yugurtən, meaning roughly "he exceeded them." The root stem agər or ugər, meaning "to exceed," survives in modern Berber languages.
Rimbaud, whose father was a French army captain, wrote a Latin ode in which the ghost of Jugurtha appears above the cradle of a baby destined to become Abdelkader al-Jazairi, a hero of the Algerian resistance against French rule. The poem presents Jugurtha as a predecessor figure whose story predicts the Algerian struggle, opening with a child born in the Arabian hills declared to be Jugurtha's heir.