As CBS This Morning faces the music about its inappropriate and insensitive use of Toto’s “Africa” to score a montage from Mandela’s funeral, we asked Rumpus author Steve Almond, a Toto “Africa” expert (see video below), what he thinks. Almond had this to say:
In a world gone almost completely mad, thank goodness we have a show like ‘CBS This Morning,’ which has finally (and at long last) given Toto’s transcendent anthem of cultural sensitivity a worthy human counterpart. One hates to speculate about such things, but it seems pretty obvious that Apartheid would have ended a lot sooner if Toto had not been so misunderstood, maligned, and marginalized during its lifetime.
Almond’s brilliant deconstruction of the Toto song “Africa” is also available in his book Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life.
