(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Sat 25 October 2025 2:00, UK
Like Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, Linkin Park’s ‘In The End’ and Darude’s ‘Sandstorm’, after it, ‘Africa‘ by Toto is more of a meme now than a song.
I mean no disrespect with that fact either. There’s a big difference between a song being a meme and a song being pilloried for being bad. Just look at the reaction those godawful recent Taylor Swift songs got from anyone who didn’t drop a year’s wages on Eras Tour tickets. Quality still has a way of being undeniable, and the way that ‘Africa’ became a meme is by being a song so good that it doesn’t matter how cringe it is.
And to be clear, ‘Africa’ is still phenomenally cringe. Yet, that chorus is so spectacular that it really doesn’t matter. This is a formula complex to the point of alchemical. One that no one has ever been able to knowingly replicate since and a vast number of songwriters have tried. As a piece of songwriting, it’s basically unimpeachable. A work that builds and builds on a veritable fisherman’s toolkit of hooks before that chorus takes the whole thing home, staying in your cerebral cortex long after the houselights have gone up at the ’80s night and the crowd starts shuffling home.
So, one might (understandably) ask the question, “If the song’s so good, why is it so cringe? Surely just being a good song saves it from that fate?” A question truly spoken like someone who has never gone through the lyrical meaning of the song. Congratulations, this means you now have something in common with 95% of people who’ve ever heard ‘Africa’ by Toto. The problem is, the further you look into the song’s goddamn lyrics, the more you’ll wish you had stayed with that 95%.
‘Africa’ 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.
So, what is the story of ‘Africa’ by Toto?
The most infamous example of this is the line “Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti”.
Now, on the one hand, both Mount Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti are in Tanzania. The problem is, they’re 317 miles apart from each other. The Status of Liberty and The White House are closer together than that. Nevertheless, while it is easy to point out the bone-headed factual inaccuracies of ‘Africa’ and call it a day, not to mention funny, the song’s inherent whiteness goes a lot deeper than that.
I don’t want to blow your mind here, but David Paich, Toto’s frontman and chief songwriter, had not been to any country in Africa when he wrote the song. Instead, as he claimed in an interview with Songwriter Universe, he was inspired by two things. The first was watching “travelogues of Africa on TV when I was growing up.” Things that “romanticised it… [I] was compelled to want to visit Africa, or at least write about it.”
The second was of a film he grew up watching, which is where things get really dark. “It was about a guy who lived in Africa, who loved Africa, and had a mail-order bride who 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.”
If this sounds like me being soft, I’m not alone in feeling this way, either. Reasonably enough, Paich’s own bandmates had issues with the song. Years after its release, the band’s virtuoso guitarist 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 all that, perhaps we’re making mountains out of molehills. 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.
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