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Frankly, I can understand why Tintin in the Congo receives all this criticism. First of all, story-wise it's probably the worst Tintin book ever made with lots of loose ends and unsolved threads and Tintin himself seems to be completely out of character, running around killing animals like a madman. And secondly, with the backdrop of one of the worst examples of criminal European colonialism, the idea of making a "tribute" to the Belgian colony (which was the original assignment Hergé got) was no good idea either.

The bloody story of the Congo in the hands of King Leopold and Belgium is apalling but hard to avoid when discussing Tintin in the Congo I think. The extracting of rubber and ivory relied on forced labour and resulted in the deaths of between 5 to 22 million (!) Congolese. This was well-known in the 1930s. The Casement Report (which detailed the abuses in the so called Congo Free State) came in 1904 and in 1908, the Belgian parliament compelled the King to cede the Congo to Belgium. When the Belgian Government took over the Administration from the king, the situation in the Congo improved dramatically but the political administration still fell under the total and direct control of the mother country; there were no democratic institutions.

Hergé must have known this in 1930 and he certainly must have known it when the story was redrawn and colorized in the 1940s. As late as in the 1970s (when the rhino-sequence was redrawn), more scenes could have been removed or changed. For example, what happened with the little Congolese boy Coco? He joined Tintin at page 11, in order to accompany him during the whole trip, then disappeared for a while when Tintin reached the disastrously portrayed Babaorom tribe, then returned briefly on page 25 to save the imprisoned Tintin but then disappeared permanently until the Xmas card of 1972 (also used on the cover of Benoit Peeters' Le Monde d'Hergé), walking in front of Carreidas carrying a basket with fruits. Coco never became a Chang or a Zorrino, although he could have. What Tintin in the Congo really misses is a scene like Tintin saving Chang in Lotus or the famous sequence in Tintin in America with the US army removing the Indians when oiled is found. I mean, a scene where Hergé somehow could voice the history of the Congo and use it as an apology. In Lotus, Tintin and Chang speaks about misunderstandings between Chinese and Europeans so why wasn't Coco granted the same thing, at least in a hypothetically recasted Tintin in the Congo?

As had been hinted in this thread, the truth of what happened in the colony is apparently still a very sensitive subject in Belgium. One of the ways King Leopold spent his profits was to found the Royal Museum for Central Africa and until a few years ago, nothing on display gave any indication that million of Congolese died unnatural deaths while these riches were being brought back to Europe. In 1999, the myth of benign colonialism in the Congo received another blow when Belgian writer Ludo De Witte published much new detail on his country’s complicity in the death of Patrice Lumumba, the first and last democratically chosen leader of the country. Lumumba became prime minister after the Congo won its independence in 1960 but after a few months in office he was deposed, imprisoned, beaten, and killed by his political rivals, who were encouraged at every step by both the United States and Belgium. De Witte’s book provoked a Belgian parliamentary inquiry and an official apology from the government.

Harrock n roll mentioned the apalling situation in present-day DR Congo but that is also derived from things that happened a century ago and so was the dictatorship of Mobutu in Zaire (whose flag with the hand holding a torch seems like a very sinister remembrance of what happened with hands in the Congo Free State just some decades before Tintin in the Congo was made...

Further reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Leopold_II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casement_Report
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Congo
http://www.howardwfrench.com/archives/2005/10/26/in_the_heart_of_darkn ess/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Museum_for_Central_Africa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Leopold%27s_Ghost

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State:


"To enforce the rubber quotas, the Force Publique (FP) was called in. The FP was an army, but its aim was not to defend the country, but to terrorize the local population. The officers were white agents of the State. Of the black soldiers, many were cannibals from the fiercest tribes from upper Congo while others had been kidnapped during the raids on villages in their childhood and brought to Catholic missions, where they received a military training in conditions close to slavery. Armed with modern weapons and the chicotte — a bull whip made of hippopotamus hide — the Force Publique routinely took and tortured hostages (mostly women), flogged, and raped the natives. They also burned recalcitrant villages, and above all, took human hands as trophies on the orders of white officers to show that bullets hadn't been wasted. As officers were concerned that their subordinates might waste their ammunition on hunting animals for sport, they required soldiers to submit one hand for every bullet spent.

One junior white officer described a raid to punish a village that had protested. The white officer in command "ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades, also their sexual members, and to hang the women and the children on the palisade in the form of a cross." After seeing a native killed for the first time, a Danish missionary wrote: "The soldier said 'Don't take this to heart so much. They kill us if we don't bring the rubber. The Commissioner has promised us if we have plenty of hands he will shorten our service.'" In Forbath's words again:

The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.

In theory, each right hand proved a murder. In practice, soldiers sometimes "cheated" by simply cutting off the hand and leaving the victim to live or die. More than a few survivors later said that they had lived through a massacre by acting dead, not moving even when their hand was severed, and waiting till the soldiers left before seeking help. In some instances a soldier could shorten his service term by bringing more hands than the other soldiers, which led to widespread mutilations and "unjust" dismemberment.

Estimates of the total death toll vary considerably. The reduction of the population of the Congo was noted by all who have compared the country at the beginning of the colonial rule and the beginning of the 20th century. Estimates of observers of the time, as well as modern scholars (most authoritatively Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin), show that the population halved during this period. According to Roger Casement's report, this depopulation was caused mainly by four causes: indiscriminate "war", starvation, reduction of births and diseases."

Good post, Mikael.

Whilst our arguments that we shouldn't censor the past, that we shouldn't remove everything we find offensive from bookshops, and that we should trust readers (including child readers) to understand and enjoy old books in their historical context all make good sense, the arguments put forward by some fans that Tintin books can never be offensive or racist just don't hold water.

That Private Eye cartoon might give some Private Eye readers the impression that Tintin in the Congo is some well-loved classic of British children's bookshelves that has fallen foul of modern political correctness. But it's worth remembering that throughout those supposedly pre-politically-correct days of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Methuen refused to translate or publish the book. In those days, Tintin books were being marketed as wholesome, intelligent books for children in the UK, and the explicit reasion why Methuen wouldn't touch Tintin in the Congo with a barge pole was because of its extreme racism. The stated reason for the current UK publishers (Egmont) deciding to finally publish Congo in English, just a year or so ago, is that there is now seen to be a market of intelligent adult collectors and older children capable of understanding this book in its historical context. That makes sense to me - I bought a copy - but if we Tintin fans are as intelligent and historically-aware as Egmont is giving us credit for being, we should be the first to acknowledge just how racist and offensive this book is.

To assist people's intelligent understanding, maybe Egmont should publish it with a much fuller and franker foreword than it currently has, as others have suggested. The current belly-band and foreword kind of imply that this book merely contains mildly racist old-fashioned portrayals that only some readers might find a bit offensive; and the wording seems to equate the portrayal of black Africans as half-wits needing to be sorted out by white masters with Tintin's old-fashioned attitude to hunting, as if the two things were morally equivalent.

As Mikael points out with far more historical knowledge than I have, this book is a pretty sick thing for an educated white Belgian to have written, given what really happened in the Belgian Congo. It's interesting that whilst Hergé had to dump Land of the Soviets after the war because of the pro-Fascist leanings of the editor who'd encouraged him to write it, no one in the Belgian left seems to have cared that much about Hergé's portrayal of the Congo, and he went on turn it into a colour album (and to profit from its sales throughout his lifetime) in spite of his stated embarassment about its content.

(Ironically, these days, now that most people accept how brutal the early Soviet regime was, Land of the Soviets reads like quite a reasonable satire on late-1920s Russia, in spite of the book's unfortunate far-right origins. If there was a colour version of Soviets being sold to children in Borders and Waterstones, I don't think anyone but a few die-hard old Communists would be calling for it to be banned. But I digress.)

I know the British Empire did many terrible things - but that's the point: like all British people of my age, I know about the British Empire and its evils because I learnt about it at school, as do kids today, and because I've read books, seen films and watched TV programmes. Almost no British person under the age of about 90 is unaware of the evils of our empirial days or would want to return to them. I don't know enough about Belgium to know whether it has really faced up to what its small but incredibly brutal empire did. I don't know whether Tintin in the Congo is sold to Belgian children these days as the sort of educational tool we'd like it to be, to teach them about the sort of rubbish their grandparents were brought up on, or if it's still being sold as pure unchallenged entertainment. It sounds like maybe it could be the latter, and that this latest row about Tintin in the Congo might be part of a process of lifting the lid on a very nasty can of worms.

I think Mikael makes a fair point that the appalling mess of the present day DR Congo is not unrelated to what happened in colonial times or the state it was left in by Belgium when they withdrew. The fact that DR Congo is still in such a mess might actually mean there's more anger around today about Herge's whitewashing of Belgian's role in the Congo, not less. If the present day Congo was enjoying peace and prosperity, and the genocides of colonial times were merely distant historical memories, then maybe the Congolese (and black people generally) might be happier to see Tintin in the Congo as the sort of quaint, mildly-offensive-but-harmless book that many Tintin fans seem to see it as.

As Tintin fans, we may not like to face it, but Hergé never seemed to undergo a moment of progressive enlightenment about black Africans the way he did about Chinese people. Maybe if he'd been introduced to a young Congolese student before writing Congo, the way he was introduced to Chang before writing The Bllue Lotus, things would have been different. But he wasn't, and it's clear from The Red Sea Sharks that even as late as the 1950s, Hergé had a problem with seeing black people as having equal intelligence to whites.

We should certainly argue for Tintin in the Congo not to be censored out of existence; but we shouldn't make daft excuses for it or for its author.

Balthazar
the explicit reasion why Methuen wouldn't touch Tintin in the Congo with a barge pole was because of its extreme racism

I'd agree that the system of government in the Belgian Congo could be called extreme racism. The belief at that time was that the white race was superior and had the right to rule others. The "Paternalism" portrayed in the book was based upon such a doctrine. The Belgian policies in the Congo at the time prevented the Africans from governing and being responsible for themselves.

However, whilst there's no doubt that in the book the caricaturing of the of the Congolese is stereotyped and the attitude towards them is patronising, where does it portray a hatred or intolerance towards the Congolese? Nowhere in the book are they shown to be the antagonists or "bad guys" (discounting the Witch Doctor). Tintin is shown to be protecting them, because in Hergé's own words they were "big children". Certainly that is a patronising view, in keeping with the paternalistic state of Congo at that time. I would call that racist, but not extreme.

Methuen were aware that a book which portrayed the caricaturing of a country and it's peoples needed to be handled with care. That's why Tintin in America didn't appear until 1978, or The Blue Lotus until 1983. And obviously they rejected Congo completely. To quote the then editor of Methuen from a Mail on Sunday article in 1988 [via H. Thompson's book): "basically, it's all to do with rubbery lips and heaps of dead animals." Methuen saw the Tintin market as primarily aimed at children. As Balthazar points out, the current publishers Egmont have woken up to the fact that their is a large adult audience for the books and that is why they chose to release Congo.

it's clear from The Red Sea Sharks that even as late as the 1950s, Hergé had a problem with seeing black people as having equal intelligence to whites.

I think that's a little unfair. Clearly Hergé was trying to atone for the Congo episode by having Tintin & Co. rescue a cargo of Africans from being sold into slavery. He was criticised at the time for the accents he gave them. I'm not making excuses for him, nor do I know how Hergé really viewed black people, but I don't think we can make such judgements on his views based on a few pages of a comic book. It would be just as easy to say that he saw all women as dragons given his portrayal of them throughout the books.

Harrock n roll
...whilst there's no doubt that in the book the caricaturing of the of the Congolese is stereotyped and the attitude towards them is patronising, where does it portray a hatred or intolerance towards the Congolese?

That's a good point; the book certainly doesn't promote racial hatred and intolerance. I'm not suggesting that Hergé's views or work were racist in that sense. And I think the much-commented-on rubbery lipped appearance of the Congolese in the book can simply be dismissed as a lazy cartoon stereotype much used at the time. Since Hergé doesn't display any hatred or even dislike of black people in the book, maybe you're right that I shouldn't say that Tintin in the Congo contains extreme racism.

But, as Hergé himself said, the book does promote the idea that the black Congolese are a more than a bit simple, and worse than that, naturally lazy and useless - as in that scene where they refuse to do anything about the broken train - unless cajoled into action by a white person like Tintin. As you say, the basic core belief behind all this is that black people are inferior and need to be ruled by white people and I think it would be fair to say that this white supremacist belief is more than mildly racist. Perhaps describing the book as containing fundamental racism would have been a better way to put it.

Harrock n roll
I think that's a little unfair. Clearly Hergé was trying to atone for the Congo episode by having Tintin & Co. rescue a cargo of Africans from being sold into slavery. He was criticised at the time for the accents he gave them.

I've read the theory that Hergé's portrayal of the Africans in The Red Sea Sharks makes ammends for his portrayal of Africans in Congo, but to me the portrayal of black Africans in the later book - apart from the fact that their faces are drawn much more realistically - seems remarkably similar to the portrayal in the first - ie: benign but patronising. The controversal accents the Africans had in early editions of The Red Sea Sharks seem the least of the problems. The Africans Haddock frees from the hold are portrayed as being almost as simple-minded and child-like as the "natives" in Congo. Haddock has to spend ages talking to what he calls "the cargo", calling them things like "dim-witted coconuts" before even a few of them grasp what he's telling them about the risks of going to Mecca. And when they finally get it, he agrees to help them "on the condition you obey my orders." Obviously it makes sense for Haddock to captain the ship, given his experience, but by what right does he assume authority over these Africans in all matters? Why are none of the Africans, some of whom are older than Haddock, let in on any decision-making? Why do Haddock and Tintin not ask any of the Africans their names, even the young guy who saves Haddock from being stabbed by the slave-trader? By contrast, earlier in the book, the first thing they ask Skut, their fellow white European, is his name (even though he's just machine-gunned a boatload of civillians). Obviously Tintin and Haddock are doing a lot of good, but they seem to be helping the Africans in a rather paternalistic sort of way, rather than treating them as social equals.

Harrock n roll
...nor do I know how Hergé really viewed black people, but I don't think we can make such judgements on his views from a few pages of a comic book. It would be just as easy to say that he saw all women as dragons given his portrayal of them throughout the books.

That's also a good point. Clearly Haddock is meant to be seen as a flawed character, rather than as a cipher for Hergé's own beliefs, and I'm sure Hergé would never have called a black person a coconut. But we do make judgements about Hergé's views on, say, Chinese people and the evils of colonialism from the pages of a book like The Blue Lotus, because in that instance we happen to approve of the views he seems to be promoting. Given how propogandist Tintin in the Congo seems in tone, and given how politically sophisticated The Red Sea Sharks is in most respects, it seems reasonable to guess that the way he portrayed black Africans in these two books (almost the only black African speaking characters in the canon) in some way reflected his own views of such people.

But I'm sorry if, in arguing the case for people's offence at Tintin in the Congo to be taken seriously, I've overstated the case against Hergé. I accept that he was a man of his time, and that his views on black people, if not as enlightened as they could have been, were certainly more benign than the views of many of his generation.

Balthazar, Harrock n roll:

We cannot blame Hergé for racism et all in Tintin in Congo. I would simply see Tintin in Congo cartoon strips created with a view point of acceptability by its readers in that era.

We must understand that it was an important period in Hergé's career from where his popularity was upsurge. Tintin in Congo became a major platform at the time and it eventually injected a feel good factor into the Belgians who colonised Congo in that period. It made Belgians relate well to the protagonist (Tintin) whilst having a sense of pride for their dominance in Congo.

As for the killing of Animals, it was about big game hunting that was a popular sport then. Hergé seems to have enjoyed every bit of it. Today it can be seen as animal abuse and a major crime, but there was no such awareness during that period.

Hergé simply took practical advantage of the situation in that era, and it is fully justified.

News from little and Brown from August 2007 : Here is a brief update on the situation with TINTIN IN THE CONGO:
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers is no longer proceeding with plans to publish Tintin in the Congo as a separate edition in the U.S. this fall. We will still offer the boxed set that includes Tintin in the Congo in one of the three-in-one volumes.This gift set is positioned as an "adult collector's edition" priced at $150.00 and will be shelved in the graphic novel section of most bookstores. It will also be shrinkwrapped and include a sell sheet that alerts consumers to the controversial content.

sponsz
This gift set is positioned as an "adult collector's edition" priced at $150.00 and will be shelved in the graphic novel section of most bookstores. It will also be shrinkwrapped and include a sell sheet that alerts consumers to the controversial content.

Well, short of an armed guard and a barbed-wire fence, that ought to make sure fewer people get to read it!

Thanks for the info sponz!

The story moves to Sweden, where a Swede of Congolese origin has launched an unsuccessful bid to get the book banned.

http://www.thelocal.se/8271/20070823/

I just came across this article about the republishing of the "Janet and John" books and other "nostagia publishing". It has quotes from some of the Egmont people about the republishing of Tintin in the Congo.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7092601.stm (scroll to the last paragraph, "Negative depictions" for the relevant passage).

...and now the book goes to court in France.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/05/word-centre-tintin-barbie- giller