A Congolese man living in Belgium is trying to have Tintin in the Congo banned in the boy reporter’s native country, almost 80 years after Tintin first donned his pith helmet and headed for Africa to patronize its people, slaughter its animals, and spark controversy.
Tintin and his creator, Herge, who launched the strip in black and white in the Petit Vingtieme newspaper in 1930, are national heroes in Belgium, where a museum celebrates his adventures and the 2 million books still sold every year in 150 languages.
However, Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, who has been campaigning for years to have the book removed from Belgian shops, says its depiction of Africans — including a scene where a black woman bows before Tintin exclaiming “White man very great. White mister is big juju man!” — is ignorant and offensive, and he has applied to the Belgian courts to have it banned.
“It makes people think that blacks have not evolved,” he said.
The verdict, originally expected on Wednesday has now been delayed until next week.
Herge redrew the book for a color edition in the 1940s and made many changes, including excising a scene where Tintin killed an elephant by blowing it up with dynamite. He also dropped all references to the “Belgian Congo,” and changed a geography lesson Tintin gave about Belgium to a math lesson. Despite the changes, the book remains equally offensive to race equality and many animal rights campaigners.
Michael Farr, Herge’s biographer, says that the artist later regretted his depiction of the Congolese, but denied it was racist, merely reflecting the way Africa was portrayed in the 1930s.
There was a move to ban the book three years ago in Britain, sparked by a complaint to the Commission for Racial Equality. This led to its being sold with a warning that some might find its contents offensive, an over-16s recommendation on some Web sites, and its removal in some shops from the children’s section to the adult graphic novels shelves. The result was that sales rocketed, climbing from 4,343 place to fifth on the Amazon bestseller list.
The Brooklyn Public Library has placed it in its reserve collection, viewable only by appointment.
Several other adventures of Tintin, his faithful dog Snowy, the identical non-twin detectives Thomson and Thompson, and the foul-mouthed Captain Haddock have hit the rocks of contemporary sensibilities and politics.
Herge was accused of Nazi sympathies because he continued working when his newspaper was taken over in World War II, and of anti-Semitism because of the depiction of Jews in some cartoon strips. The first Chinese translation of Tintin in Tibet was titled, at the insistence of the authorities, Tintin in China’s Tibet.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS