E-Paper
Billions of blistering barnacles!
The original black and white version of Tintin in the Congo was serialised in a Belgian children?s supplement in 1930. When it appeared as a book a year later, colonialism was still an up-and-running enterprise, and what is today?s Democratic Republic of Congo was at that time a Belgian colony.
The original black and white version of Tintin in the Congo was serialised in a Belgian children’s supplement in 1930. When it appeared as a book a year later, colonialism was still an up-and-running enterprise, and what is today’s Democratic Republic of Congo was at that time a Belgian colony. After the debut success of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets in 1929, Tintin’s creator Hergé was badgered into sending his hero into Belgian Congo by a missionary friend so that youngsters could learn something about the ‘Dark Continent’. Not surprisingly, Tintin in the Congo mirrored the ingrained prejudices of colonial Europe, portraying Africans as ‘great big children’ waiting to be civilised, and worse, as ignorant, idle savages fodder for slapstick comedy.
The English version of the 1931 book was published in 1991. But it’s only last year that the ‘revised’ colour version, published in 1946, was published in English. This edition is still riddled with political incorrectness. But as far as charges of bigotry go, modern readers have allowed Hergé’s depictions to be treated as anachronisms — the way, say, the medieval Dante Alighieri is let off the hook for placing Prophet Mohammad in the eighth circle of hell.
Unfortunately, activists of the People of the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) are not so forgiving — or sophisticated. Even though a forenote accompanies the book explaining that the creators had no intention to offend animal lovers, Peta is demanding that Tintin in the Congo be pulled out. Sure, Tintin mows down antelope, pots a monkey for its skin, wounds an elephant (in the original, he blows up a rhino). But then, do we ban the Ramayana for depicting the killing of a golden deer or setting a monkey’s tail on fire?
