"For the light it sheds on the problems of the new Africa as well as the old, it should be read by everyone concerned with the continent’s affairs"—Africa Report
"Efforts to explain the nature of Africans and their culture led eventually to discussion of race, of origins, of languages, of climate, of Islam, and of biblical interpretations of man’s creation. . . . Scholars will find this monumental study most useful not only for assumptions about Africans and their history, but also for the light cast on such social sciences as anthropology and ethnology, for theories of tropical medicine, and also for its vast bibliographical information."—Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences