Hold the line, it’s Toto, calling about the rain down in Africa

It’s well known that when David Paich, one half of the songwriting duo of the Californian soft-rock band Toto, wrote the band’s most famous song, Africa, he had never in fact been to Africa.

To actual Africans, this was pretty obvious since he did that thing which people who have no clue about Africa do: they refer to it as a single place. They tend to think of “Africa” as though it is comparable to downtown San Francisco. Had Paich ever been to “Africa”, he might have noticed that it’s a bit larger and a lot more diverse than a suburb of LA.

Whatever the case, Toto’s 1982 hit is still listened to with affection all over the world. Except of course in “Africa”, where it’s regarded as something of a guilty pleasure by people who frequented one too many suburban parties in the 1980s.  

Africa is one of the few songs that have more than a billion listens on Spotify, and remains Toto’s outstanding hit. But even in the 1980s, the song never got higher than 18 on the SA charts, although it was number one in the US and a top-10 hit all over Europe.

This is notwithstanding some of the oddest lyrics in pop music, like the second line of the chorus, “there’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do”. What? But the song is saved by a sweet sense of rain coming down in Africa as a guy heads off to see his aid-worker girlfriend somewhere near a place called the Serengeti. Hence, the famous line, “I bless the rains down in Africa”.

And on the subject of blessings, what is it about Telkom? It’s been pointed out to me, I won’t say by whom, that the reports about unsolicited bids for SA’s former telephone company are possibly the first time the words ‘Toto', ‘rain' and ‘Africa' have appeared together so many times in actual news stories.

And it does seem that Telkom is blessed at the moment, because it’s being … how should we say? … rained on with takeover bids. All of them are a bit odd, and, really, you have to sympathise with the Telkom board as they try to sort through these bids.

Rain’s bid was actually formally withdrawn on Tuesday because of the objection of the Takeover Regulation Panel, which was in a snit because it wasn't informed. But presumably, the bid will formally return after all the t’s are crossed and the i’s dotted.

The Toto bid is really hard to fathom. Fresh from being turned down as a bidder for SAA, the Toto Consortium slapped down a R15-billion bid for the government’s 40% stake in Telkom. The consortium is obviously rolling in cash, because it controls a big chunk of Richards Bay Minerals, which is owned by Rio Tinto. With commodity prices running, presumably, their pockets are full at the moment.