The Masai tribe described in Ernest Hemingway's The Green Hills of Africa (1935) can be seen as a model for Bellow's Arnewi.

The assumptions about European colonialism found in the Tarzan comic strips of Edgar Rice Burroughs are parodied in Bellow's novel.

Among the sources in cultural anthropology that Bellow may have drawn upon are Sir Richard Burton's A Mission to Gelele the King of Dahomey, John Roscoe's The Souls of Central Africa, and Herskovits's The Cattle Complex in West Africa.

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), one of the greatest novels of the end of the Colonial period, presents ideas that contrast with those in Bellow's novel.