[1] The book was reviewed in The Outlook by Lucille Fort Hewlings who compared it to André Gide's Travels in the Congo, which was published in English around the same time.

Hewlings wrote: "If two Frenchmen had not happened to publish books about the negro at the same time, no one would have been so hard-hearted as to have subjected the work of Paul Morand (discussed below) to the ordeal of comparison with that of André Gide.

Hewlings continued: "Black Magic will be interesting to readers of Bruno Frank's brilliant The Persians Are Coming, for Morand presents in Congo an example of the African out of America whose primitive appeal to anemic Europe is breaking down its civilization.

This theory is further upheld by the drawings of Aaron Douglas when he gives us those pale shadowy figures dancing before a symbolic background.

Pale arms raised in supplication to an African god that magnetizes decadent Europe after the scourge of war.