© Dominic Nahr / Oeil Public – October 2008. People carrying their belongings as they flee one of the refugee camps due to fighting.

The DRC is a huge country with a population of over 65 million, about the same as the UK. It has substantial mineral deposits and has fertile land but it is a victim of its brutal colonial past, of its geography and its troubled neighbors. Despite repeated international efforts, the civil war continues and millions are suffering, particularly in the eastern part of the country.

But there is hope.

© Ryo Kameyama – May 2008, Kisangani. A child receiving treatment at the MSF mobile clinic in Kitchanga.

Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) is providing basic medical care and vaccination programs. They are also highlighting the ongoing tragedy in a campaign called Condition Critical.

With wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is easy to forget the plight of a troubled African country. You can help by raising awareness of this terrible situation. Email your friends about Condition Critical, update your Facebook status or tweet about the amazing work Médecins Sans Frontières are doing in this forgotten conflict.

Don’t let the deaths and suffering of millions of people go unnoticed.

With a high profile film on the way, Moulinsart must be wondering what to do about this never ending stream of bad publicity. There is a very real danger that Herge’s name and reputation will become tarnished by this 80 year old comic but their options are limited and none of them are ideal.

Publish and be Dammed

Ignoring the fuss and sticking to the line that Tintin Au Congo is a work of a young writer living in a very different time is certainly the most honest and intellectually sound idea but it all to easily could look like they are condoning racism.

The investors in the movie will be nervous about how this will play in America. At the moment, Tintin is almost unknown so no one really cares but in 18 months time, it will be a different story. Images of black protestors outside of cinemas would critically damage the film in the race conscious USA. With a reported $130 million invested we can be sure that the studios executives will be on the phone to the head of Moulinsart, Nick Rodwell, demanding that something is done.

Bury It

The simplest option is for Moulinsart to make an announcement saying that the book is out-dated and to stop publishing the book, removing all traces of it from their product line. Rather like the victim of a Stalinist purge, Tintin Au Congo will be airbrushed out of the official history, leaving behind an idealised image of Herge and his creation for public consumption. Certainly, real Tintin fans would know about the book and rumours would circulate in the general public but the charges of racism would be effectively blunted.

To an extent this has been done already, with its withdrawal from the US market but in order silence the critics, they need to withdraw it all languages and all editions, including the facsimile editions. This approach is the easiest option and will cost the company relatively little in lost sales.

The Sacred Cow

Herge left strict instructions that no one else should write or draw Tintin after his death and Moulinsart have devoutly stuck to this. The temptation of the millions a new Tintin book could make has been suppressed by the overwhelming desire to protect Herge’s legacy and honour his life work. But can this commitment stand up to the pressure of public opinion and the demands of studio executives? Would Moulinsart release a modified, updated version of Tintin in the Congo?

This would be a major step for Moulinsart and one that may open the floodgates to new Tintin material but it would have a number of advantages. It tackles the accusation of racism without creating the skeleton in the closet that simply burying the book might create. It would be profitable as well as millions of Tintin fans buy the new edition and it generates a huge amount of positive publicity.

No Right Answer

Each of these potential solutions create their own problems and picking between them is no easy task but it seem unlikely that doing nothing is a viable option. A constant stream of Tintin is Racist headlines will damage Herge’s reputation and the prospects for the film.

Personally I think they should publish and be dammed. Herge’ life story is complex but overall it is a positive one. Trying to hide or deny Europe’s colonial and racist past helps nobody in the long run. Tintin exemplified the boy scout idea of being honest and doing the right thing. Let’s be honest about Tintin’s past.

The Brooklyn Public Library has moved Tintin in the Congo from its public shelves and placed it under lock-and-key as part of “a special collection of historic children’s literature that is available for viewing by appointment only”. This censorship was done after the library received just a single complaint. Yet, the library has received over two dozen complaints about other works in the last few years and not one other book has been moved off the shelves.

There is no denying the racist elements of Tintin in the Congo, a work by a naive and unenlightened creator but the nature of public libraries is that they will contain material that is offense to some, or indeed many, people. Obvious examples include Hitler’s anti-sematic Mein Kampf ( Brooklyn Library’s has 10 copies) and Vladimir Nabokov exploration of child sex Lolita (seven copies). So why has this one work been singled out?

The answer lies in the medium and the audience – Comics and Children.

Comics in America have always been seen as something only suitable for children and worthy of special treatment regardless of 1st Amendment Rights. In the 1950’s, the Comics Code Authority (CCA) was formed to regulate the content of comics. Though it had no legal authority, its used public opinion and panics over of juvenile delinquency to force major publishers to either go along with the code or go bankrupt. The strict rules the CCA imposed restricted the growth and development of the comics medium in the US and to a lesser extent in the UK. In Europe and Japan, where no such rules existed, the medium flourished and explored a wide range of themes for a wide range of age groups.

However it cannot be ignored that Tintin in the Congo is a children’s book and that the stereotype’s children are exposed to can have significant impact. Herge himself is a great example of this. The images he drew in Tintin in the Congo reflect the images of black people that he grew up with. There is a real case to be made that Herge’s first two books should not be in a children’s section or at least come with some sort of warning for parents but that is along way from locking a book up away from public view.

The debate about Tintin in the Congo is not an abstract discussion about censorship and civil liberties. It is a real problem having real impacts. Already, white supremacists are using the book as a rallying point for their vitriol (see Tintin on the Front Line of Racism).

By focusing on one aspect of Herge’s work we are losing the sight of how Herge’s life exemplifies the battle against racism. His is a story about how one man overcame his prejudices to become an ambassador for peace and understanding across cultures but to understand this story we must be able to read all of it.

Source: A Library’s Approach to Books That Offend, Image of original complaint, Brooklyn Public Library, Tintin au Congo’s library card ( 1 copy ).

This redrawing of the cover from Tintin in the Congo was found in the Congo by Nuala Sawyer, a photographer working with on location with a film crew. As Nuala notes “The funny thing is that the Congolese seem to embrace Tintin—I think that interpretations of racism are incredibly different in the Congo than the USA.”. More photos at Photokapi

Thanks to The Tintin Blog for spotting this.

Mural Decorated Hut

Tribal Chief

These photos come from Photographs from Lang-Chapin Congo Expedition (1909-1915). Whilst these photos capture some of the beauty of the Congo and its people, they only tell half the story. The photo below is of rubber plantation workers, punished for failing to meet quotas by having their hands cut off (Belgian Congo Free State, 1905).

More striking and disturbing images can be found on the blog Constant Siege.

Unfortunately the message Herge embodies – that we can overcome our fears and predjuices to be better human beings – is lost on people from the far left and the far right of politics. Calls for his books to be banned miss the point and play into the hands of extreme right wing racists.

Black People “look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles”.

This quote from the UK’s Commission for Racial Equality ( CRE ) is the title of a thread from the white supremacists site Stormfront.org [ WARNING: This is a site dedicated to 'White Pride World Wide' and all the hate and stupidity that involves ]. The idiots who frequent the site have focused on using the CRE’s statement and have spouted some predicable racist claptrap in support of Herge and Tintin.

This subversion of the Herge’s work in support of such a perverse agenda is sickening and it highlights the dangers of either side of the political spectrum focusing on a narrow aspect of an author’s work. The subject of Herge’s and racism is complex, inexplicably tied to the culture he grew up in and above, a message of hope and humanity.

Note: Clicking the links to the Stormfront web site will cause offense to all right-thinking people. In the HTML, I’ve have marked them as ‘no follow‘ so that the search engines will ignore these links.

The bottom half of this image is from Tintin in Angola (”Tim-Tim em Angola”), the Portuguese version of Tintin in the Congo. The top half is the original version.

This is a great example of how colonial / racist attitudes displayed in Tintin in the Congo were the norm for the time. The Portuguese publisher clearly felt that their country’s superiority over its colony Angola was identical to Belgium’s superiority over the Congo. Clearly the racism demonstrated by Herge in his early work was simply reflecting the widespread racism across all western, colonial powers at that time.

This image comes from Héctor Germán Oesterheld’s and Carlos Roume’s Nahuel Barros’ Last Story – Coda, from the web site of a Portuguese comics critic. The blog is in English and probably contains lots of interesting stuff but the layout of the text is an unreadable dense mass. This is a shame as I suspect breaking things into a few paragraphs and adding a ton of whitespace would make it a really good blog.

To celebrate this I’m declaring today Chang Day in memory of the fictional Chang in The Blue Lotus and Tintin in Tibet and the real life Zhang Chongren who inspired him. Zhang Chongren visited Belgium in early 1930’s, became close friends with Herge and his influence helped shape the next Tintin 70 years of Tintin.

Zhang returned to China in 1936 and the pair lost contact during the turbulent years of the Second Sino-Japanese War. It wasn’t until the 18th March 1981 that the two were reunited.

Let’s celebrate cultural diversity and the undying bond of friendship – Chang Day – March 18th.

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, which had been planning to publish Tintin in the Congo, a book criticized for its racist, Colonial-era depictions of Africans, has quietly pulled the title from its fall list, PW has learned. The publisher also said it will not include the book in a forthcoming box set of all 24 books in the Tintin series.



Publicist Melanie Chang did not give a reason for the standalone book’s cancellation, but of its omission from the box set she said, “Given the controversy surrounding the Congo title, we felt including it in the box set would eclipse the true intention of the collection, which is to showcase Hergé’s extraordinary art and his remarkable contribution to the graphic arts.”

From the BBC’s review of the year in cartoons, looking at the whole Herge / Tintin / Racism fuss.