Because it was released shortly before Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Jump and Other Stories, the collection in which "The Ultimate Safari" was published, is not considered to be one of Gordimer's major works. Nonetheless, the book received widespread reviews in the major media of the day, and several reviewers remarked specifically on the story itself.

John Banville, writing in the New York Review of Books, wrote that the story, one of the "three fine stories" in the collection, "fairly quivers with angry polemic, yet achieves an almost biblical force through the simplicity and specificity of the narrative voice."

Writing inAmerica, Jerome Donnelly writes that the collection as a whole achieves a "unity" that is "remarkable" considering the multiplicity of voices Gordimer uses, and the "simple, controlled narrative of wonderment filtered through a mind too unknowing to be terrified generates powerful understatement...