50 free Madagascar trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
44 free Madagascar trivia questions with answers. Madagascar is the fourth-largest island on Earth and one of the strangest: it drifted away from Africa and India so long ago that around 90 percent of its wildlife lives nowhere else. This quiz covers the real island first, with questions on lemurs, the cat-like fossa, the aye-aye's eerie middle finger, Grandidier's baobabs, the vanilla trade, the Merina kingdom and Queen Ranavalona I, French annexation, independence in 1960 and the highland capital of Antananarivo. Then it heads to the DreamWorks films, because that is how many people first met the place: Alex, Marty, Melman and Gloria, King Julien and the penguins, who voiced them, the sequels and how much they earned. The easy questions ask which ocean the island sits in and which lion Ben Stiller played; the hard ones want the world's smallest primate, the highest peak and the name of the 1947 uprising. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the country, its wildlife and the films, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Madagascar lies in which body of water?
The Indian Ocean
It sits off the southeastern coast of Africa across the Mozambique Channel.
Q 02By area, Madagascar ranks where among the world's islands?
Fourth-largest
Only Greenland, New Guinea and Borneo are bigger, and it is the second-largest island country after Indonesia.
Q 03What is the capital and largest city of Madagascar?
Antananarivo
Its colonial French name was Tananarive, and locals still shorten it to Tana.
Q 04Roughly what share of Madagascar's wildlife is found nowhere else on Earth?
Over 90%
The island split from Africa around 180 million years ago and from India about 90 million years ago, so its species evolved in isolation.
Q 05Which two languages are official in Madagascar?
Malagasy and French
Malagasy is an Austronesian language, closer to the languages of Borneo than to anything spoken in mainland Africa.
Q 06The Malagasy language is most closely related to a language still spoken on which island?
Borneo
Its nearest relative is Ma'anyan, an East Barito language of Central Kalimantan, some 7,300 kilometres away.
Q 07In which year did Madagascar gain independence from France?
1960
Independence came on 26 June 1960, and the country joined the United Nations that September.
Q 08Which people, from the central highlands, are the most numerous of Madagascar's ethnic groups?
Merina
Merina nobles united most of the island in the 19th century as the Kingdom of Madagascar.
Q 09Which 19th-century queen banned Christianity in Madagascar and pushed most foreigners out?
Ranavalona I
She ruled from 1828 to 1861 and used forced labour to build a standing army of 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers.
Q 10Madagascar supplies about what share of the world's natural vanilla?
80%
Vanilla was the country's top export in 2017 at $894 million, ahead of nickel and cloves.
Q 11'Bourbon vanilla', the type grown in Madagascar, takes its name from the former name of which island?
Réunion
It was on Réunion in 1841 that a 12-year-old enslaved boy, Edmond Albius, worked out how to hand-pollinate the orchid.
Q 12How many of the world's nine baobab species grow in Madagascar?
Six
The island also holds three-quarters of its 860 orchid species.
Q 13The famous Avenue of the Baobabs runs along a road near which western town?
Morondava
About 20 to 25 Grandidier's baobabs line a 260-metre stretch of the unpaved Road No. 8.
The Malagasy name for the baobab, 'renala', translates as what?
Q 21What is the largest mammalian carnivore native to Madagascar?
Fossa
It looks like a small cougar but is related to mongooses, and lemurs make up over half of its diet.
Q 22How does the Madagascar hissing cockroach make its signature sound?
Expelling air through its body
Unusually for a cockroach it has no wings, so the hiss is its main defence.
Q 23Which extinct flightless giant of Madagascar may have been the largest of its kind that ever lived?
An elephant bird
Aepyornis maximus lived alongside 17 species of giant lemur and dwarf hippos, all wiped out after humans arrived.
Mother of the forest
The trees are survivors of dense tropical forests that once covered the region.
Q 15Madagascar is home to about two-thirds of the world's species of which reptile?
Chameleons
That includes the smallest known species.
Q 16The word 'lemur' comes from a Latin word meaning what?
Ghosts
Linnaeus borrowed 'lemures', the spirits exorcised during Rome's Lemuria festival, and applied it first to a slow-moving loris.
Q 17Which Madagascan animal is the world's smallest primate?
Madame Berthe's mouse lemur
It weighs about 30 grams; at the other extreme, the recently extinct Archaeoindris was gorilla-sized.
Q 18Which lemur finds grubs by tapping on trees, then digging them out with a thin middle finger?
Aye-aye
Early naturalists mistook it for a rodent because of its ever-growing incisors; it is the world's largest nocturnal primate.
Q 19Which of these lemurs is famous for having only a rudimentary tail?
Indri
Also called the babakoto, it is one of the largest living lemurs and sings loud songs lasting up to three minutes or more.
Q 20Male ring-tailed lemurs settle disputes with what kind of contest?
Stink fights
They douse their tails in scent from wrist glands and waft them at rivals.
Q 24Madagascar's first permanent settlers are thought to have arrived by outrigger canoe from which region?
Present-day Indonesia
Bantu groups crossed the Mozambique Channel from Africa a few centuries later, around the ninth century.
Q 25What is Maromokotro?
Madagascar's highest peak
It rises 2,876 metres in the Tsaratanana Massif in the north of the island.
Q 26The highland custom of famadihana involves doing what?
Exhuming ancestors and rewrapping them in fresh shrouds
It is a festive family reunion as much as a rite, and Christian ministers are sometimes invited to consecrate it.
Q 27Which sport is considered the national sport of Madagascar?
Rugby union
On the coasts, a bare-knuckle fighting style called moraingy also draws big crowds.
Q 28The valiha, Madagascar's most emblematic instrument, is what kind of instrument?
A bamboo tube zither
Early settlers carried it from southern Borneo, and similar instruments survive in Indonesia and the Philippines.
Q 29The name of Madagascar's capital is usually translated as what?
City of the Thousand
King Andriamasinavalona renamed the hill in honour of the soldiers of King Andrianjaka, who had founded it around 1610.
Q 30Roughly how high above sea level does Madagascar's capital sit?
About 1,280 m
That makes it the highest national capital of any island country.