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Tintin in the Congo: is Hergé’s classic comic finally destined for cancellation?

The cover of Herge's Tintin au Congo (1931) - Hergé/Moulinsart/Geoff Pugh
The cover of Herge's Tintin au Congo (1931) - Hergé/Moulinsart/Geoff Pugh

These are bad times for the reputation of the late Leopold II of Belgium. Across that country, statues of the 19th-century monarch have been pushed over, doused with red paint and set ablaze. The Black Lives Matter protests have drawn renewed attention to the fact that during Leopold’s reign, Belgium presided over an African slave-regime of extraordinary cruelty, even by the standards of the time.

Anything between half a million and 10 million Congolese people are thought to have died during the Belgian colonial years. Beatings, mutilations and killings were standard tools of industrial relations in the rush to make a fortune from rubber. This year, for the 60th anniversary of Congolese independence, Belgium’s King Philippe made a formal statement of regret for his country’s colonial past.

So, will the heat now turn on that other great icon of Belgian national identity? I speak, of course, of Tintin. Long before Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter, there’d been a growing sense that the attitudes embodied in Hergé’s classic comic-strips were, well, a little iffy.

The most notorious example, of course, is Tintin in the Congo. The cover of the handsome hardback Collector’s Edition – £10.03 from Amazon – carries a picture of a tanned-looking Tintin in a pith hat, careering across the veldt in a soft-topped jalopy. In the passenger seat of the car, staring goggle-eyed into the middle distance, is a kinky-haired, thick-lipped caricature of a young black boy, of the sort which, if it appeared on a pot of marmalade these days, would see Asda burned to the ground.

Within, it’s not much better. The locals are presented as simpleminded, prone to laziness and apt to say things like (in the English translation): “White mister! You come save us! King lion, him getting very angry!” It’s not Klan propaganda, but it reproduces a view of the world in which black Africans are childlike creatures in need of the civilising hand of the white European.

Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo (r, with his lawyer) campaigned in 2010 to ban the book in Belgium - Reuters
Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo (r, with his lawyer) campaigned in 2010 to ban the book in Belgium - Reuters

This was far from the comics’ only questionable racial representation. Tintin’s other adventures brought him into contact with scheming, hook-nosed Jews (The Shooting Star), noble “redskins” (Tintin in America) and toothy, sadistic, harakiri-prone Japanese (The Blue Lotus).

As I say, this is not the first generation to notice that these depictions are what now gets called “problematic”. Indeed, racial sensitivity meant that Tintin in the Congo was the last of the books to be published in English. And in 2007 the Commission for Racial Equality called for it to be withdrawn from sale, while the New York Public Library removed its copy to a locked room. In 2010, a Congolese man, Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, asked a Brussels court to ban the book. (He lost his case.)

Some of Hergé’s comics were later rewritten. In The Shooting Star, for instance, Blumenstein was renamed “Bohlwinkel”. A scene in Tintin in the Congo, in which our hero blows up an elephant with dynamite, was excised. Hergé, who had drawn his first cartoons in the 1920s, offered a qualified apology: “The fact is that while I was growing up, I was being fed the prejudices of the bourgeois society that surrounded me.

“It’s true that [Tintin in the Land of the Soviets] and [Tintin in the Congo] were youthful sins. I’m not rejecting them. However, if I were to do it again, they would be different.”

And we should note that the noisomely quiffed boy reporter is, on his own and Hergé’s terms, a highly and uncomplicatedly moral character: loyal, honourable and decent. But racism can be well-meaning and still be racism. These stories participate in the subtle form of discourse described by Edward Said as “orientalism”. In brief: Tintin goes forth from civilised Western society to report on a world populated by funny-looking foreigners. These foreigners are not always “othered” in a malevolent way, but they are othered all the same. A noble savage is a savage for all that.

Herge (pictured in 1978) later repented of some of his depictions - Francois Lochon
Herge (pictured in 1978) later repented of some of his depictions - Francois Lochon

Here is a version of the argument that Chinua Achebe made about Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the greatest Western novel about the Congo. Conrad sought to expose and deplore the savagery of the Western colonial enterprise there – but he nonetheless failed to accord the native victims a full measure of humanity. As Achebe put it, scaldingly, the whole of Africa was reduced “to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind”.

But if we acknowledge the merit in these arguments, what does that imply? Should we “cancel” these writers – whatever that would mean? Remove them from print? Plaster them with trigger-warnings?

No. We could, after all, reel off countless examples of works that would fail an ideological purity test. #MeToo would probably do for Mr Rochester, and certainly do for Heathcliff. Eliot and Pound are toast; Kipling likewise. And what about the n-word in Agatha Christie; in Sylvia Plath; in Patti Smith? The “sweet tang of rape” in Ian Fleming? The moral mise-en-abyme around paedophilia that is Nabokov’s Lolita?

This argument against “cancellation” seems persuasive only because it’s a straw-man. Nobody sensible thinks the art of the past should be judged by the moral standards of the present. Nobody sensible thinks that we should censor historical work that fails to accord with our own mores. And it would be the purest arrogance to imagine we would not in turn be so judged ourselves by the mores of the future.

Statues of Leopold II have been vandalised across Belgium of late - Reuters
Statues of Leopold II have been vandalised across Belgium of late - Reuters

Writers – some of whom are morally clairvoyant and others very much not – live in history. They reproduce the attitudes of their times. There can be a fine line between trafficking in archetypes and trafficking in stereotypes. What a work of fiction is “saying”, as first-year undergraduates know, is very seldom a simple thing in any case. It’s often saying several, sometimes contradictory, things at once.

So let us make a more modest case. The statue argument – over which we’ve also seen a lot of straw-man talk – provides a decent parallel. It’s sometimes said that removing statues is an attempt to “erase history”. That is the purest nonsense. You don’t remove Edward Colston from history by removing his statue from Bristol city centre. History is a critical discipline; public statuary is a more or less vulgar form of ancestor-worship. A public statue is a celebration. We can choose what or who we celebrate without having any effect on the truth of the historical record.

And the issue with Tintin isn’t even that it’s a part of literary history. It’s that it’s a children’s book. The question is whether – or when – children will have the critical faculties to read it for what it is. My sense is that most of them, for what it’s worth, do. My 11-year-old daughter, for instance, just glanced at my copy of Tintin in the Congo, and exclaimed: “Oh my God! What is that book? Why is it so… racist?”

Were she black or mixed-race, however, I suspect she’d feel even more uncomfortable if Tintin in the Congo were a mainstay of her school library. And to be honest, it wouldn’t just be a disservice to children to have Tintin’s more tin-eared adventures on the shelves of those libraries: it would be a disservice to Hergé himself.