Africa by Toto

About

“Africa” is the third single from Toto’s 1982 album titled Toto IV. It is the group’s most popular song and reached #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in early 1983. The lyrics comprise a heartfelt (if somewhat fantastical and stereotyped) vision of the beauty of Africa. There are undercurrents of embodying the continent of Africa in a female figure that is referenced throughout the song. Africa is, of course, an enormous continent full of a variety of cultures, but the lyrics touch on what a white kid growing up in 1970s America would have been exposed to in pop culture, as drummer Jeff Porcaro stated in an interview: … a white boy is trying to write a song on Africa, but since he’s never been there, he can only tell what he’s seen on TV or remembers in the past. This “white boy” is not the narrator of the song, who songwriter David Paich described as a social worker. Instead, this “white boy” is probably David Paich himself. As Paich told SongFacts.com, “That was me using a lot of writer’s license. I remember seeing lots of films of starving and famine when I was a kid in pictures of Africa. Then I’d seen some movies and read a lot of the National Geographics, and always wanted to go to Africa, so I romanticized this story about a social worker that goes over there and falls in love with working with the country and doing good“