Malawi Trivia
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49 free Malawi trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Malawi calls itself the Warm Heart of Africa, and it has a lake with more fish species than any other on Earth, a mountain that rises sheer out of the plains, a city named after David Livingstone's Scottish birthplace, and a name that means "flames". It was ruled for thirty years by a life president who had trained as a doctor in Edinburgh, and it produced a teenager who built a windmill from scrap to power his village. This Malawi trivia quiz covers all of it. Forty-four questions run from geography (Lilongwe, Blantyre, Zomba, Lake Malawi, the Shire, Mulanje and Sapitwa, Likoma, Nyika) through history (the Maravi, the slave trade, Livingstone, the Central Africa Protectorate, Nyasaland, the Federation, 6 July 1964, Hastings Banda, the 1993 referendum, Muluzi, the Mutharikas, Joyce Banda, Chakwera) to culture and economy (the flag, the kwacha, Chichewa, nsima and chambo, Gule Wamkulu, tobacco and tea, the Flames and the Queens, William Kamkwamba). Roughly a third are easy, a third medium, and the rest are for people who really know southern Africa. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedia and official pages, so the dates, numbers and names are ones you can rely on.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which city is the capital of Malawi?
Lilongwe
Lilongwe was picked in 1965 as a growth point for the centre and north of the country, and ten years later it took over as capital from a city in the south.
Q 02Which city was the colonial capital and then independent Malawi's first capital until the mid-1970s?
Zomba
Zomba kept Malawi's parliament until 1994, almost two decades after the rest of the government had moved away.
Q 03Malawi's commercial capital, Blantyre, was named after the Scottish birthplace of which explorer?
David Livingstone
David Livingstone was born in the Scottish mill town of Blantyre, and Church of Scotland missionaries gave its name to the mission they founded here in 1876, three years after his death.
Q 04What is the name Malawi usually said to mean?
Flames
Flames is the usual translation, and one tradition says the great lake shimmered like fire when the first settlers looked down on it from the highlands.
Q 05By what affectionate nickname is Malawi widely known?
The Warm Heart of Africa
The Warm Heart of Africa is about the people rather than the weather: the nickname credits Malawians' reputation for friendliness to strangers.
Q 06Lake Malawi holds what world record among lakes?
More fish species than any other
More fish species than any other lake live here, most of them cichlids that evolved in the lake itself and are found nowhere else on Earth.
Q 07Why is Lake Malawi nicknamed the 'Calendar Lake'?
It measures about 365 miles by 52
It measures about 365 miles by 52 in the popular telling, a mile for each day and week of the year, though surveys make the lake a little shorter and narrower.
Q 08Which river flows out of the southern end of Lake Malawi to join the Zambezi?
Shire
The Shire is the lake's only outlet, and the falls along its middle course drive the power stations that supply most of Malawi's hydroelectricity.
Q 09Sapitwa, Malawi's highest peak at about 3,000 metres, crowns which great massif in the south?
Mount Mulanje
Mount Mulanje stands alone because its hard igneous rock has resisted erosion while the land around it wore down into plains.
Q 10Likoma and Chizumulu islands are exclaves of Malawi entirely surrounded by which country's waters?
Mozambique
Mozambique's waters surround both islands, but they stayed Malawian because British missionaries had made Likoma their headquarters in the 1880s, before the border was drawn.
Q 11Which is Malawi's largest national park, covering a plateau in the north?
Nyika
Nyika's plateau is so high that it is often wrapped in cloud, and the constant moisture brings more than 200 kinds of orchid into flower on its open grassland.
Q 12Which Bantu kingdom flourished between Lake Malawi and the Zambezi from about the 16th century?
Maravi
Maravi power peaked around 1700, when its rulers held much of today's Malawi and parts of two neighbouring countries, before slave raiding and invasion broke it apart.
Q 13In 2016 and 2017, about 500 of which animals were trucked across Malawi to restock Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve?
Elephants
Elephants had been greatly reduced at Nkhotakota by poaching, so herds were moved in from Liwonde and Majete in the south; Prince Harry worked with the capture teams.
Q 21Who became Malawi's president in 2012 after the death of Bingu wa Mutharika?
Joyce Banda
Joyce Banda was vice-president but had been expelled from the ruling party, and its leaders kept the death quiet for two days before she was finally sworn in.
Q 22Which opposition leader won Malawi's 2020 presidential election?
Lazarus Chakwera
Lazarus Chakwera, a preacher turned politician, took 59 percent in a re-run that the courts ordered after annulling the 2019 vote; voters turned him out again in 2025.
Q 23Which celebrity founded the charity Raising Malawi in 2006 and went on to adopt children from the country?
Madonna
Q 14After seeing fishermen's lanterns at night, an explorer named Lake Malawi the Lake of what?
Stars
Stars: the Lake of Stars was his name for the night-time scene, and it now belongs to a music festival first held on the lake's shore in 2004.
Q 15Under what name was Malawi a British protectorate from 1907 until independence?
Nyasaland
Nyasaland offered settlers cheap land for plantations while a hut tax pushed Africans to work on them for months each year, a grievance that fed an armed rising in 1915.
Q 16From 1953 to 1963, which two territories shared a British-made federation with the future Malawi?
Northern and Southern Rhodesia
Northern and Southern Rhodesia are now Zambia and Zimbabwe; African nationalists opposed the union from the start, and it was dissolved after only ten years.
Q 17Two years to the day after independence, on 6 July 1966, what did Malawi become?
A republic
A republic replaced the arrangement in which Queen Elizabeth II had stayed on as head of state, which is why 6 July is both Independence Day and Republic Day.
Q 18Under Hastings Banda's strict dress code, which everyday garment were women in Malawi forbidden to wear?
Trousers
Trousers stayed illegal for Malawian women until 1994; the same code banned skirts above the knee, except at holiday resorts out of public view.
Q 19Which title was Hastings Banda given in 1971?
President for life
President for life proved a promise he could not keep: a 1993 referendum ended one-party rule, and he lost the multi-party election held the following year.
Q 20Who won Malawi's first multi-party presidential election in 1994, ending three decades of one-man rule?
Bakili Muluzi
Bakili Muluzi, once a minister under the old regime, won with 47 percent of the vote and at once freed political prisoners and restored freedom of speech.
Madonna's second adoption was at first refused by a Malawian court because she did not live in the country, a ruling that was overturned on appeal.
Q 24What is the currency of Malawi?
Kwacha
Kwacha means 'it has dawned', and the coin it divides into, the tambala, means 'rooster', on the idea that a hundred roosters announce the dawn.
Q 25What symbol sits at the centre of the black stripe on Malawi's flag?
A red rising sun
A red rising sun stands for the dawn of hope and freedom; in 2010 the government swapped it for a full white sun amid controversy, and the old flag came back in 2012.
Q 26Which Bantu language, also known as Nyanja, is the most widely spoken in Malawi?
Chichewa
Chichewa got its present name in 1968, when the country's first president insisted that the language long called Chinyanja be renamed.
Q 27Nsima, Malawi's staple food, is usually made from what?
Ground maize
Ground maize makes the stiff porridge eaten with almost every meal, yet maize only reached Africa from the Americas in the 1500s and 1600s; before that the staples were sorghum and millet.
Q 28Chambo, a prized eating fish of Lake Malawi, belongs to which familiar group of fish?
Tilapia
Tilapia known as chambo have long been a mainstay of the lake's fishery, but overfishing has cut their numbers so sharply that one chambo species may already be extinct.
Q 29Which crop is Malawi's biggest export earner?
Tobacco
Tobacco brings in so much of Malawi's foreign exchange that the country has been called the world's most tobacco-dependent economy; its burley leaf goes into cigarette blends worldwide.
Q 30In 2019 Malawi became the first country in the world to give children a new vaccine against which disease?
Malaria
Malaria kills a child somewhere every two minutes, most of them in Africa, so the vaccine went first to Malawian under-twos in a pilot that two other African countries joined within months.