Credit: Far Out / Columbia Records
Sat 5 September 2026 21:00, UK
If you know anything about Toto, aside from the little dog in The Wizard of Oz, it’s bound to be ‘Africa’.
There’s no escaping the fact that the gargantuan 1982 hit will certainly outlive the band, all of us, and probably a zombie apocalypse. For the past four decades and more, the song has kept delivering the goods “as sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti”, to use Toto’s own words.
Yet for a band who, up until that point in time in the early 1980s, had built somewhat of a cult following in the prog rock world and had had mixed successes as far as the pop charts, making a mainstream hit to end all mainstream hits was a concept that had never even crossed their minds. It just simply happened one day, without an explanation.
That might sound like a gross exaggeration of the facts, because surely no one can just come up with a transcendent chart-topper on the spot, but Toto’s keyboardist and singer, David Paich, would argue that this was the God’s honest truth. The essential lyrics of the chorus came to him in a flash, almost as if it were a divine intervention.
He pleaded his case in a later interview, attesting, “I sang the chorus out as you hear it. It was like God channelling it. I thought, ‘I’m talented, but I’m not that talented. Something just happened here!’” To be fair to Paich, not much else can account for how the genesis of ‘Africa’ came about. It was just one of those cases of fate.
However, as much as the idea of blessing the rains down in Africa struck him much like a flood of inspiration, it wasn’t like the rest of the track was destined to be that easy. Indeed, it took the writer the best part of a further six months of refinement and work before he had the guts to show it to the rest of the band, probably fearing their final judgement.
As it turned out, this trepidation wasn’t entirely unjustified, as the group weren’t exactly timid about voicing the extent of their reservations. Steve Lukather even infamously said that “I told the rest of the band that if this song became a hit, I would run naked down Hollywood Boulevard”. Well, he’d be having to get his kit off quite quickly, then.
Further reading: From The Vault
But in any case, the whole point was that Toto had inadvertently created something that extended far beyond the sum of their parts, which none of them could seemingly fathom for quite some time. They were used to being the band that just scraped by for success, not the ones riding high in a blaze of glory. In a way, they had the continent beyond their horizons to thank.
That summarised the legacy of ‘Africa’ in a nutshell, no matter how easy some parts of the song were to create compared to the laborious endeavours of others. Any artist can tell you what it feels like to hit a goldmine, but few feel like they have actually been struck by God. For Paich, as well as Toto as a whole, that religious experience changed their lives infinitely for the better.
