Massa Tintin does a Congo white-wash

Vaishnavi C Sekhar / Feb 5, 2006, 00:35 IST

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Out of print for decades, COngo, the most Controversial of the tintin comics was recently released in india , with a foreword explaining the colonial context.

Tintin in the Congo
Herge
Egmont
For decades, Tintin In The Congo remained tantalisingly out of reach for young fans of the adventure series.

You sometimes saw it on the back of Tintin comics but never in the bookshops��which was deeply frustrating once you'd read the Tintin titles so many times over that Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus had embedded themselves into your childhood imagination along with Asterix, Hercule Poirot, Bertie Wooster and the like.
Out of print for decades, the new edition of Tintin In The Congo has been recently released in India as a 'collector's edition'.

This is the first time the 1946 colour edition has been made available in English, but that's not the only reason to approach this title as a collector's item.
The charm of Tintin In The Congo does not lie in inventiveness of plot or character quirks��do not look for new cuss words from Captain Haddock or the espionage thrills of The Calculus Affair��but from the insights it offers into the colonial mindset and the evolution of Herge the artist.
The most controversial of the series, Congo was originally published in 1930 when the African state was still a Belgian colony and Herge worked for a right-wing publisher.
As an early work��it is the second of the Tintin adventures, the first being Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets��its storyline is simplistic, its art work relatively crude and the entire story infused seen through a colonial prism.
Tintin and Snowy sail off to Congo, where they hire a 'boy' called Coco and spend their trip bashing up big game and lording it over the native tribes, while evading a bumbling assassin.
The Africans are indistinguishably pitch black and thick-lipped, caricatures alternately bemused or awe-struck by the "white mister"; and the wildlife is bumped off in interestingly horrible ways (Maneka Gandhi would not approve).
Herge was later embarrassed by this work and while revising the book in 1946, excised the more offensive parts.
A school lesson on "our country Belgium" for African students was converted into an arithmetic class and Tintin's encounter with a rhino was redrawn��the original, where he drills a hole in its back and stuffs it with dynamite was changed to the rhino accidentally setting off a gun.
The translators emphasise in the foreword of this reprint that Herge "himself admitted that he depicted the African people according to the bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period".
They also warn that their depiction might offend today's readers; a surrender to 21st-century political correctness we could have done without.
The naive racism is what makes this book interesting, a reflection of Herge's cultural context which is absent in later works. Reading Congo also makes you realise how quickly Herge evolved.
The plot and artwork of his next work, Tintin In America, published just two years later, is more refined, and his worldview wider, as evident in the critical depiction of the displacement of native American Indians.
In a few more years, he would etch pre-war Shanghai and its inhabitants in The Blue Lotus with an astonishing accuracy, detail and sensitivity.

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