“Like magic”: How Toto wrote 1982’s ‘Africa’
It turned out that Toto held their first number one in the bag despite being the very last to spot it.
They were big on the pop-rock parade. Standing with the likes of Journey or Styx as US punk’s late 1970s chart enemy, Los Angeles’ Toto injected a little proggy jazz into their glossy bluster, scoring a winner with their ‘Hold the Line’ debut in 1978 but trailing for the next few years on the Hot 100.
1982’s Toto IV changed their pop fortunes sharpish. Enjoying a boost with the lead single ‘Rosanna’ peaking at number two, the follow-up ‘Africa’ would smash all the soft rock competition and briefly see Toto as the biggest band in America, topping the singles chart for the first time and near enough single-handedly catapulting the Toto IV album to the lofty number four on the Billboard 200.
Not that they were expecting it. Songwriter and frontman David Paich knew he had something, however, when the basic guts of his ‘Africa’ hit almost arrived to him with effortless divinity. A fascination with the continent had been with him since he was a kid; tales of his teachers’ former missionary work at his all-boys Catholic school would yield lyrical singalong gold, “I bless the rains down in Africa”, lifted straight from the Christian messengers’ habit of blessing the rainfall along with the villagers and crops as part of their spreading the ‘good word.’
‘Africa’s true spark came from the Yamaha CS-80. Toying with the polyphonic synthesiser, a pleasing brassy sound was stumbled upon by Paich, where the opening riff materialised almost immediately. Humming a melody along with emerging words painting ‘Africa’s emerging lyrical picture, Paich couldn’t believe how easily his sketch was evolving into a full-blown demo.
“Hang on,” he reflected to The Guardian in 2018. “I’m a talented songwriter, but I’m not this talented! It was as if a higher power was writing through me, because this stuff was coming out like magic.”
Further lyrical shape was had from watching a documentary about the troubles plaguing an unspecified chunk of the continent, borrowing some scene-setting from National Geographic and depicting the lonely tale of a missionary starved of company against the backdrop of Paitch’s imagined African idyll. Naturally, its thorny thematic terrain prompts all kinds of questions over white saviour tropes and a Eurocentric crushing of the continent’s vast ethnic and geographic diversity into one romanticised blob.
Such lyrical queasiness wasn’t lost on guitarist Steve Lukather. “I thought the song had a brilliant tune, but I remember listening to the lyrics and going: “Dave, man, Africa? We’re from North Hollywood,” he recalled to the same Guardian feature. “What the fuck are you writing about? ‘I bless the rains down in Africa?’ Are you Jesus, Dave?”
It didn’t seem to matter that Paich bellowed “Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti” despite being situated over 300 miles from each other; ‘Africa’ topped the American charts and ingrained itself as a future Toto concert staple to this day, a 1980s pop behemoth that continues to enjoy radio rotations amid the discourse of colonial sanitisation. Still, Paich gleaned a faint validation of sorts when performing their mega smash in Cape Town in 1996.
“I went on a safari through a game reserve,” Paich reflected. “People had heard the song and asked: ‘So when were you in Africa?’ I admitted I’d never been there till now. They said: ‘But you describe it so beautifully!’ That just warms my heart.”
