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.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
RSS