Madagascar Trivia
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96 free Madagascar trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 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 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Madagascar lies in which body of water?
The Indian Ocean
The Indian Ocean surrounds Madagascar, which lies about 400 km off Africa's southeastern coast; that gap and its currents have kept the island's wildlife isolated.
Q 02Which island is bigger than Madagascar, the world's fourth-largest?
New Guinea
New Guinea and Greenland are two of the only three islands larger than Madagascar, which is itself bigger than mainland France, its former colonial ruler.
Q 03What is the capital and largest city of Madagascar?
Antananarivo
Antananarivo, shortened locally to Tana, sits high in the central highlands, which gives the capital mild, dry winters in which frost is rare but not unknown.
Q 04Madagascar's nickname, the Great Red Island, comes from the colour of its what?
Soil
Soil: the rock of the central highlands weathers into red laterite, which washes away fast once the forest and grass cover above it are stripped.
Q 05Which two languages are official in Madagascar?
Malagasy and French
Malagasy and French are the two official languages; English was added as a third by the 2007 constitution but dropped again by the one voters approved in 2010.
Q 06The Malagasy language is most closely related to a language still spoken on which island?
Borneo
Borneo is home to Ma'anyan, the closest relative of Malagasy; after many centuries apart, speakers of the two languages can no longer readily understand each other.
Q 07Which people, from the central highlands, are the most numerous of Madagascar's ethnic groups?
Merina
Merina kings built the 19th-century Kingdom of Madagascar, bringing most of the island under one crown before France abolished the monarchy in 1897.
Q 08Which 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; within a year nearly all foreigners had left, and she kept the kingdom closed for a generation.
Q 09What is the name of Madagascar's currency?
Ariary
Ariary notes replaced the Malagasy franc, and the unit is a rare non-decimal currency: one ariary divides into five iraimbilanja rather than a hundred of anything.
Q 10'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 11Outside Africa and Madagascar, which country has a native baobab?
Australia
Australia's boab is one of eight baobab species, six of them unique to Madagascar; a 2024 genome study pointed to the island as the place where the trees arose before spreading overseas.
Q 12The famous Avenue of the Baobabs runs along a road near which western town?
Morondava
Morondava is the jumping-off point for the avenue, a short drive away, where towering Grandidier's baobabs line a dirt road and visitors gather to watch the sunset.
Q 13Reny is Malagasy for mother; the baobab's local name, renala, means what?
Mother of the forest
Mother of the forest suits giants that once stood in dense woodland: it was cleared as the population grew, leaving the baobabs of the famous avenue standing alone.
Q 21How does the Madagascar hissing cockroach make its signature sound?
Expelling air through its body
Expelling air through breathing holes in its body makes the hiss, whereas most noisy insects rub body parts together; males also hiss when they fight.
Q 22Which extinct flightless giant of Madagascar may have been the largest of its kind that ever lived?
An elephant bird
An elephant bird's closest living relative is New Zealand's little kiwi, DNA shows; the giants are thought to have died out around a millennium ago, after people settled the island.
Q 23Madagascar's first settlers are thought to have arrived in what kind of craft?
Outrigger canoes
Q 14Madagascar is home to more species of which reptile than any other place on Earth?
Chameleons
Chameleons include Labord's chameleon of south-west Madagascar, which spends about eight months as an egg and then lives only four or five months after hatching.
Q 15The word 'lemur' comes from a Latin word meaning what?
Ghosts
Ghosts: the Romans' lemures were restless spirits of the dead, and Linnaeus borrowed the word in 1758 for animals that go about mainly by night.
Q 16Which Madagascan animal is the world's smallest primate?
Madame Berthe's mouse lemur
Madame Berthe's mouse lemur weighs about 30 grams and measures some 9 cm from nose to rump; to save energy it slips into a daily torpor, letting its body temperature and metabolism drop.
Q 17Which lemur finds grubs by tapping on trees, then digging them out with a thin middle finger?
Aye-aye
The aye-aye fills the niche of a woodpecker, a bird Madagascar lacks: it listens for hollows, gnaws in with ever-growing incisors and hooks out the grubs.
Q 18Which of these lemurs is famous for having only a rudimentary tail?
Indri
The indri has only a stub of a tail a few centimetres long; it is among the largest living lemurs, and its groups stake out territory with loud, wailing songs.
Q 19Male ring-tailed lemurs settle disputes with what kind of contest?
Stink fights
In 'stink fights', male ring-tailed lemurs draw their tails through scent glands on their wrists and chests, then wave the reeking tails at a rival until one backs down.
Q 20What is the largest mammalian carnivore native to Madagascar?
Fossa
The fossa looks like a small cougar but belongs to a carnivore family found only in Madagascar; it hunts lemurs, chasing them through the treetops.
Outrigger canoes are generally assumed to have carried the first settlers from far-off Asia around the middle of the first millennium, centuries before migrants crossed from nearby Africa.
Q 24Which channel separates Madagascar from the African mainland?
Mozambique Channel
The Mozambique Channel is about 400 km wide at its narrowest; migrants from East Africa crossed it to settle about a millennium ago.
Q 25The highland custom of famadihana involves doing what?
Exhuming ancestors and rewrapping them in fresh shrouds
Exhuming ancestors and rewrapping them in fresh shrouds is the heart of this 'turning of the bones'; families then dance with the bodies to live music before reburying them.
Q 26Which sport, rather than football, is considered the national sport of Madagascar?
Rugby union
Rugby union draws crowds of up to 40,000 to watch the national side, the Makis, who warm up with a war dance of their own, much like New Zealand's haka.
Q 27The valiha, Madagascar's most emblematic instrument, is what kind of instrument?
A bamboo tube zither
A bamboo tube zither: the valiha is Madagascar's national instrument, and many modern players string it with unwound bicycle brake cable for a punchier sound.
Q 28The name of Madagascar's capital is usually translated as what?
City of the Thousand
City of the Thousand recalls the garrison of a thousand soldiers that King Andrianjaka posted on the hill after seizing it in the early 1600s.
Q 29Around 1700, the island of Sainte-Marie off Madagascar's east coast was a base for whom?
Pirates
Pirates used Sainte-Marie as a hideout between raids, and many married into local families; a pirate cemetery still stands on the island.
Q 30Ilakaka grew from a hamlet into a boomtown after 1998 thanks to the discovery of which gem?
Sapphires
Sapphires found near Ilakaka in 1998 set off a rush that turned a truck stop of a few huts into a mining town supplying about half the world's stones within a decade.