Tintin out of Congo - The politically correct comic book

By Naomi Conrad

Brussels is a city of comics: second hand shops vie with cafes and chocolateries, not to forget the many waffle stands, for the freezing tourists’ attention: dark, dingy and slightly dusty, lined with shelves weighed down by thousands of colourful books and old editions, from the well-known Schtroumpf or French Asterix, to more explicitly adult books and obscure comics set in the trenches of the Second World War, comic fanatics browse the shelves while bemused tourists wonder at Manga and Star Wars figurines in grimy glass cases. And visitors on their way to the Official Comic Book Museum housed in a beautiful Art Nouveau building stop to take photos of the huge wall murals of comic heroes scattered around Brussels’ streets and squares.

Yes, Belgians definitely take their comics seriously; they are, after all, part of their national culture and heritage, one might say. So when it comes to claims that one of the most famous comic heroes is politically incorrect, racist even, then it is most definitely not a laughing matter.

Tintin, the boy reporter and his little dog Snowy are a Belgian institution. Yet the two heroes, who are in their late 70s and gained international fame through their fearless exploits in such far-flung and exotic places as China or the Soviet Union, have been accused of being racist and endorsing paternalistic colonialism.

The charge is particularly levelled at ‘Tintin in the Congo’, the second book written and drawn by Belgian Georges Prosper Remi, otherwise known as Hergé, who, never having set foot in Congo, drew his inspiration from the colonial department of the Bon Marche supermarket. 

In the book Tintin and Snowy set out to the Congo, like the true paternalistic colonisers of their time, to discover and bring enlightenment to an ‘uncivilised’ country inhabited by ‘natives’. Coco, Tintin’s ‘boy’, communicates in caricature pidgin French, the Congolese are portrayed as stupid, slow and often sly and even Snowy, no offence to animal lovers, possesses by far more intelligence than any of the ‘natives’. The book was first published in 1931, when Congo was still a Belgian colony, and immediately turned into a national best-seller.

In fact, Congo Free State was anything but free or even a state, but from 1885 to 1908 the personal colony of King Leopold II, who did his best to bleed the country of all its natural wealth, in particular rubber and copper. He managed the state through a dummy non-governmental organization, the International African Association, of which Leopold was the sole shareholder and chairman. The money was used to fill Leopold’s coffers and pay for his extravagant building projects. The brutal mistreatment of the local people got so bad, even in colonial standards of the time that the Belgian state finally took over the running of the colony in 1908. It was not until 1960 that the Congo gained its independence.

Hergé redrew the formerly black and white book in 1946 in colour in an attempt to make it a shade more politically correct, removing several references to the Congo being a Belgian colony. The underlying white superiority was not retouched.

So it is not surprising that in the 1960s, a period marked by the struggle for decolonisation, Tintin’s colonial attitudes and adventures became considerably less fashionable. The publisher Casterman stopped printing the book, without however removing it from its catalogue. In fact, it was a Congolese magazine, Zaire, which rediscovered the book in 1969 and published exracts, but not without adding a cautionary foreword for its readers. Once Congo had let Tintin re-enter its territory, Casterman deemed it acceptable to reprint the book in its 1946 version.

However, not every country agreed: in the UK the book was excluded from reprints for decades and it was not until 2005 that a publication by Egmont publishing house brought the book to British shelves, including a foreword which explained that the book must be read as a product of its times.

It was this version, on sale in a bookshop in London, which prompted a customer to contact the British Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) in 2007. The CRE accused the book of containing ‘hideous racial prejudice’ and advised it should be removed from the shelves.  While the Borders book shop chain agreed to move the offensive book to the adult graphic novel section, the official Tintin shop, as well as Waterstone’s and WH Smith, decided to keep on selling it. 

In Belgium CRE’s comments did not go unnoticed: Bienvenu Mbutu, a Congolese citizen living in Brussels, decided to take the Moulinsart company who owns the books’ rights to court. His aim is to obtain a blanket prohibition of the book. So far to no avail, he has yet to receive an official response two years after lodging his claim, a request to see his file is unlikely to be granted before the end of this year. 

While Belgium is dragging its feet and the court case enters its third year, others have openly endorsed Tintin et al: Steven Spielberg is currently turning the reporters’ adventures and exploits, albeit not the controversial Congolese ones, into a Hollywood film due to be released in 2011.

Given Belgium’s difficulties in coming to terms with its colonial past, an example of which his the only cursory treatment in the national African museum, it seems unlikely that the mural of Tintin in central Brussels, taken from one of Herge’s later and less contentious stories, or the many copies of the comic book on the dusty shelves and in the boxes of the countless second hand shops, will be given explanatory and cautionary plaques or forewords.