What is Toto’s ‘Africa’ actually about?
‘Africa’ by Toto is more of a meme now than a song. The question is, however, what makes a song a meme? If there is a formula, it’s one complex to the point of alchemical that no one has ever been able to knowingly replicate. Based on a cursory look at Toto’s lasting legacy, along with the likes of Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’, and 4 Non Blondes’ ‘What’s Up’, barely anything unites them apart from their comic virality.
The closest one can get is a feeling of nebulous undeniability. It’s too good to be forgotten, but too cringe to be taken seriously, and ‘Africa’ is absolutely the best example of both these aspects. As a piece of songwriting, it’s basically unimpeachable. A work that builds and builds on a veritable fisherman’s toolkit of hooks before exploding into a chorus well worth being howled into any night since it was released in summer 1982.
The cringe, however, comes from the moment you start analysing the song’s meaning, because, oh dear. This is absolutely the story of a bunch of rich, Tipp-Ex white California natives deciding to write a song about the concept of “Africa”—a place that, if you read the lyrics of the song, they seem to have spent as much time in as Narnia.
The most infamous example of this is the line “Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti”. Granted, both Mount Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti are in Tanzania, in much the same way that Mount Rushmore and the Hollywood sign are in America. Nevertheless, while it is easy to point out the bone-headed factual inaccuracies of ‘Africa’ and call it a day, fun even, the song’s inherent whiteness goes a lot deeper than that.
What is the story of ‘Africa’ by Toto?
David Paich, Toto’s frontman and chief songwriter, had not been to any country in Africa when he wrote the song. Shocker, I know. Instead, he based the song, as he claimed in an interview with Songwriter Universe, on “travelogues of Africa on TV when I was growing up”. Based on this, he “romanticised it and was compelled to want to visit Africa, or at least write about it”.
With this in mind, he constructed a song based on the memories of a film he grew up watching. Brace yourself, this goes to some weird, dark places. “It was about a guy who lived in Africa, who loved Africa, and had a mail-order bride that came in. He’d never met her, and when she got to Africa, she had to choose between staying there in Africa and living that lifestyle or going back home. So, it’s kind of an old-fashioned, romanticised story about that film in my imagination.”
Fucking yikes. I’m not alone in feeling this way either, as Paich’s own bandmates had issues with the stuff their singer was yammering about in the song. Years after the song’s release, Steve Lukather told The Guardian, “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. What the fuck are you writing about? I bless the rains down in Africa? Are you Jesus, Dave?’”.
Despite that, the tune spoke for itself. Maybe that’s all it needs to do. If you’re going to Toto, of all bands, for an accurate depiction of any continent, let alone one as charged as Africa, then the problem is you. That doesn’t stop the lyrics to this iconic 1980s track from being a deeply, deeply uncomfortable listen, one that could have only come out of the decade that taste forgot.
