Madagascar Trivia
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47 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 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Madagascar lies in which body of water?
The Indian Ocean
Madagascar lies in the Indian Ocean off Africa's southeastern coast, separated from Mozambique by the Mozambique Channel, about 420 km wide at its narrowest.
Q 02By area, Madagascar ranks where among the world's islands?
Fourth-largest
Madagascar is the fourth-largest island on Earth at about 587,000 km²; only Greenland, New Guinea and Borneo are bigger, and among island countries only Indonesia is larger.
Q 03What is the capital and largest city of Madagascar?
Antananarivo
Antananarivo, called Tananarive under French rule and shortened locally to Tana, is Madagascar's capital and by far its largest city, home to well over a million people.
Q 04Roughly what share of Madagascar's wildlife is found nowhere else on Earth?
Over 90%
Over 90% of Madagascar's wildlife is found nowhere else: the island separated from mainland Africa in the Jurassic, well over 150 million years ago, and its species have evolved in isolation since.
Q 05Which two languages are official in Madagascar?
Malagasy and French
Madagascar's two official languages are Malagasy and French: Malagasy is an Austronesian language, and French is a legacy of more than six decades of colonial rule.
Q 06The Malagasy language is most closely related to a language still spoken on which island?
Borneo
Malagasy's closest relative is Ma'anyan, an East Barito language of southern Borneo, spoken some 7,300 km from Madagascar.
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
Ranavalona I, who reigned from 1828 to 1861, outlawed Christianity in 1835 and drove out most Europeans, isolating the kingdom while forced labour sustained an army of some 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers.
Q 10What is the name of Madagascar's currency?
Ariary
Madagascar's currency is the ariary, which replaced the Malagasy franc as the official unit in 2005 and divides into five iraimbilanja rather than a decimal subunit.
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 baobab species are found only in Madagascar?
Six
Six baobab species are endemic to Madagascar, among them Grandidier's baobab; mainland Africa and Australia account for the handful of others in the genus Adansonia.
Q 13The famous Avenue of the Baobabs runs along a road near which western town?
Morondava
The Avenue of the Baobabs lies on the dirt road between Morondava and Belon'i Tsiribihina in western Madagascar, where some 20 to 25 Grandidier's baobabs line a 260-metre stretch.
Q 21What is the largest mammalian carnivore native to Madagascar?
Fossa
The fossa, up to about 10 kg and 1.5 m from nose to tail tip, is Madagascar's largest native carnivore; it looks like a small cougar but belongs to the mongoose-related family Eupleridae and preys mainly on lemurs.
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
Q 14The Malagasy name for the baobab, 'renala', translates as what?
Mother of the forest
Renala, or reniala, the Malagasy name for the baobab, means 'mother of the forest' (reny, mother; ala, forest), recalling the dense forests that once surrounded the trees.
Q 15About half of all species of which reptile are found only in Madagascar?
Chameleons
Chameleons: roughly half of the world's 200-odd chameleon species are endemic to Madagascar, including Brookesia nana, a leaf chameleon described in 2021 and one of the smallest reptiles known.
Q 16The word 'lemur' comes from a Latin word meaning what?
Ghosts
Lemures were the ghosts of the restless dead in Roman belief, placated at the Lemuria festival; Linnaeus borrowed the name for the animals' silent, nocturnal, ghost-like habits.
Q 17Which Madagascan animal is the world's smallest primate?
Madame Berthe's mouse lemur
Madame Berthe's mouse lemur, at about 30 grams with a body under 10 cm, is the smallest primate known; at the other extreme, Madagascar's 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
The aye-aye taps bark, listens for hollows, gnaws in with ever-growing rodent-like incisors and hooks grubs out with its thin middle finger; it is the largest nocturnal primate.
Q 19Which of these lemurs is famous for having only a rudimentary tail?
Indri
The indri, or babakoto, has only a stub of a tail a few centimetres long, unusual among lemurs; it is among the largest living lemurs and sings choruses lasting up to three minutes.
Q 20Male ring-tailed lemurs settle disputes with what kind of contest?
Stink fights
In 'stink fights', male ring-tailed lemurs rub scent from their wrist and shoulder glands onto their tails and waft them at rivals until one backs down.
The elephant bird (Aepyornis and the even bulkier Vorombe) stood up to 3 m tall and weighed several hundred kilograms, the heaviest birds known; it died out after humans settled the island, alongside giant lemurs and dwarf hippos.
Q 24Madagascar's first permanent settlers are thought to have arrived by outrigger canoe from which region?
Present-day Indonesia
Madagascar's first settlers were Austronesians from present-day Indonesia, who crossed the Indian Ocean by outrigger canoe in the first millennium AD; Bantu speakers from East Africa followed centuries later.
Q 25What is Maromokotro?
Madagascar's highest peak
Maromokotro, at 2,876 metres in the Tsaratanana Massif in the north of the island, is Madagascar's highest peak.
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
Rugby union is widely regarded as Madagascar's national sport, with the national side, the Makis, drawing tens of thousands to Mahamasina Stadium in Antananarivo; on the coasts, bare-knuckle moraingy also draws big crowds.
Q 28The valiha, Madagascar's most emblematic instrument, is what kind of instrument?
A bamboo tube zither
The valiha is a bamboo tube zither: strings run along the outside of a bamboo tube and are plucked; it descends from the tube zithers of maritime Southeast Asia, 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
Antananarivo means 'City of the Thousand': King Andriamasinavalona renamed the hill town, founded around 1610 by Andrianjaka, in honour of the thousand soldiers Andrianjaka had garrisoned there.
Q 30Roughly how high above sea level does Madagascar's capital sit?
About 1,280 m
Antananarivo sits about 1,280 metres above sea level on Madagascar's central highlands, giving it a mild subtropical highland climate far cooler than the coasts.