Tintin in the Congo

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Tintin in the Congo
(Tintin au Congo)
TinTin Congo.jpg

Cover of the English edition
Publisher Le Petit Vingtième
Date 1931
Series The Adventures of Tintin (Les aventures de Tintin)
Creative team
Writer(s) Hergé
Artist(s) Hergé
Original publication
Published in Le Petit Vingtième
Date(s) of publication 5 June 1930 – 11 June 1931
Language French
ISBN 2-203-00101-1
Translation
Publisher Egmont United Kingdom
Date 2005
ISBN 1-4052-2098-8
Translator(s) Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner
Chronology
Preceded by Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, 1930
Followed by Tintin in America, 1932

Tintin in the Congo (in the original French, Tintin au Congo) is the second title in the comic book series The Adventures of Tintin, written and drawn by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Originally serialised in the Belgian children's newspaper supplement, Le Petit Vingtième between June 1930 and July 1931, it was first published in book form later that year. Hergé would later redraw and colour the work for a new edition in 1946, and then made alterations to one of the pages for republication in 1975. The story was designed to encourage children to learn more about what the Abbé Norbert Wallez (editor of Le Vingtième Siècle, in which Le Petit Vingtième appeared) felt were the positive aspects of Belgian rule in the Congo.

The plot revolves around the young reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who travel to the Belgian Congo to report on the situation of the country there. Once in the central African nation, the duo get into various adventures, encountering wild animals, friends and foes amongst the local black and white people, and American diamond smugglers in the employ of Al Capone.

Following on from the success of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1929–30), Tintin in the Congo also proved popular with the Belgian public, allowing Hergé to continue the series with a third installment, Tintin in America (1931–32). The book was also hugely popular in the Congo, and retained its popularity there throughout the 20th century.[1] Since the late 20th century, however, the book has came under criticism from some for its portrayal of the Congolese people, which several critics have called racist.[2][3] The book has also been criticised for its portrayal of big game hunting and the mass slaughter of African wildlife. Hergé himself was embarrassed by the work because of these elements, for which he expressed regret in later life, referring to the book as an error of his youth. It is because of its controversial nature that its publication in English was delayed until 1991.

Contents

[edit] Plot

Belgian reporter Tintin and his faithful dog Snowy travel to the Congo, where the pair are greeted by a cheering crowd of natives.[4] Hiring a native boy, Coco, to assist him in his travels, Tintin has to rescue Snowy from being eaten by a crocodile prior to recognising a stowaway who had been aboard the ship that had brought them to the continent. The stowaway attempts to kill Tintin, who is saved by monkeys throwing coconuts down from a tree, knocking the villain unconscious. He then finds that Snowy has been kidnapped by a monkey, and rescues him.[5]

The next morning, Tintin, Snowy, and Coco crash their car into a train, which the reporter subsequently fixes and then tows to the Babaorum's village, where he is greeted by the king and accompanies him on a hunt the next day. During this, Tintin is knocked unconscious by a lion, but is rescued by Snowy, who bites the carnivore's tail off. Tintin gains the admiration of the natives, making the Babaorum witch-doctor Muganga jealous; with the help of the stowaway, he plots to accuse Tintin of destroying the tribe's sacred idol. Imprisoned by the villagers, Tintin is rescued by Coco and then shows them footage of Muganga conspiring with the stowaway to destroy the idol, something which incenses them. Tintin goes on to become a hero in the village, with one local woman bowing down to him and stating "White man very great! Has good spirits… White mister is big juju man!"[6]

Angered, Muganga starts a war between the Babaorum and their neighbours, the M'Hatuvu, whose king leads the attack on the Babaorum village. Tintin outwits them and the M'Hatuvu people subsequently cease hostilities and come to idolise Tintin too. Muganga and the stowaway then plot to kill Tintin by making it look like a leopard kill, but again Tintin survives, even saving Muganga from being killed by a boa constrictor, for which Muganga pleads mercy and ends his hostilities. The stowaway attempts to capture Tintin again, eventually succeeding disguised as a Catholic missionary. In the ensuing fight across a waterfall, the stowaway is eaten by crocodiles.[7] After reading a letter that the stowaway had in his pocket, Tintin finds that a figure known only as A.C. has ordered that he be killed. Capturing a criminal who was trying to rendezvous with the now dead stowaway, Tintin learns that it is the American gangster Al Capone who has ordered his death. Capone had "decided to increase his fortune by controlling diamond production in Africa", and feared that Tintin might be onto his plans. With the aid of the colonial police, Tintin arrests the rest of the diamond smuggling gang.[8]

[edit] History

[edit] Background

The Belgians King Albert I and Queen Elisabeth inspect the military camp of Leopoldville during their visit to the Belgian Congo, 1928.

Following the success of the first story in this series, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, which had been serialised through 1929 and 1930, Hergé had wanted to send his protagonist, the boy-reporter Tintin, to the United States of America, but Wallez had other ideas, and commanded Hergé to write a story set in the Belgian Congo (the modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo).[9] As Tintinologist Michael Farr noted, Wallez believed that the Belgian colonial regime in the Congo needed to be promoted at a time when memories "were still fairly fresh" of the publicised 1928 visit of the Belgian King Albert and Queen Elisabeth to the colony.[10] Hergé would later characterise Wallez's instructions by sarcastically claiming that he referred to the Congo as "our beautiful colony which has great need of us, tarantara, tarantaraboom".[11]

Just as in Land of the Soviets, where Hergé had based his information about the Soviet Union almost solely on a single source, in Tintin in the Congo he again made a very limited use of source material to learn about the central African country and its people. As literary critics Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier noted, the comic was based almost entirely upon the literature written by missionaries, with the only added element being that of the diamond traffickers, which they thought was probably adopted from the "Jungle Jim-type serials".[12] In his psychoanalytical study of the series, "Tintinologist" Jean-Marie Apostolidès highlighted that in the Congolese adventure, Tintin represented progress and the Belgian state, being a model for the natives to imitate so that they could become more European and hence civilised in the eyes of Belgian society.[13] In the 1970s Hergé, in his interview with Numa Sadoul, admitted the errors in his understanding of the Congo, stating that:

For the Congo as with Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, the fact was that I was fed on the prejudices of the bourgeois society in which I moved… It was 1930. I only knew things about these countries that people said at the time: 'Africans were great big children… Thank goodness for them that we were there!' Etc. And I portrayed these Africans according to such criteria, in the purely paternalistic spirit which existed then in Belgium.[3]

[edit] Original publication, 1930–1931

Frame from the original 1931 version, in which Muganga taunts the captured Tintin.

The result of Wallez's command to send Tintin to the Belgian Congo was Tintin in the Congo, serialised in Le Petit Vingtième from 5 May 1930 through to 11 June 1931 and subsequently serialised in the French Catholic newspaper Coeurs Vaillants from 20 March 1932.[9] Drawn in black and white, Tintin's "second adventure follows almost exactly the formula set in the first", remaining "essentially plotless", and instead consisting of a series of largely unrelated events that Hergé thought up and wrote each week. Unlike in the previous Tintin adventure however, Michael Farr felt that some sense of a plot emerges at the end of the story, with the introduction of the American diamond-smuggling racket.[14] The Tintinologist Harry Thompson, however, held a differing opinion, believing that "Congo is almost a regression from Soviets", having no plot or characterisation, and he therefore defined it as being "probably the most childish of all the Tintin books."[15]

Visually, Tintin in the Congo is very similar in style to Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, being once more in black and white.[16] In the first installment of the story, Hergé featured a cameo of Quick and Flupke, two young boys living in Brussels whom he had only recently developed for their own comic strip in Le Petit Vingtième, which had begun serialisation on 23 January 1930.[10]

The story would prove, like Land of the Soviets before it, to be popular among its Belgian readership and, as such, Wallez decided to repeat the publicity stunt he had used when Soviets had come to the end of its serialisation. In July 1931 he employed an actor to dress up as Tintin in colonial gear and to publicly appear in Brussels and then Liège, accompanied by 10 African bearers and an assortment of exotic animals hired from a zoo. The event was hugely popular, with the Brussels stunt attracting a crowd of 5,000.[17] In 1931, the serialised story was then collected together and published in a single volume by the Brussels-based company Editions de Petit Vingtième, while a second publication was brought out by the publisher Casterman in 1937.[9]

[edit] Second version, 1946

In the 1940s, when Hergé's popularity had increased, he decided to redraw many of the original black and white Tintin adventures in color using his newly developed drawing style of ligne claire, so that they visually fitted in with the new Tintin stories that he was creating. Tintin in the Congo was one such of these books, with the new version being published in 1946. As a part of this modification, Hergé also cut the page length down from 110 plates to the standard 62 pages, as suggested to him by the publisher Casterman. For the 1946 version, Hergé also made several changes to the actual story, for instance cutting many of the references to Belgium and colonial rule. This decision, Farr claimed, was made to broaden its appeal to readers in nations other than Belgium and not because Hergé believed that imperial rule would come to an end, something which only occurred in 1960.[18] For example, in the scene where Tintin teaches Congolese school children about geography, he states in the 1930–31 version that "My dear friends, today I'm going to talk to you about your country: Belgium!" whereas in the 1946 version, he instead gives them a mathematics lesson, asking "Now who can tell me what two plus two make?... Nobody". In another change, the character of Jimmy MacDuff, the owner of the leopard that attacks Tintin, was changed from a black manager of the Great American Circus into a white "supplier of the biggest zoos in Europe."[18]

The opening frame from the 1946 version of the book. In the crowd are Quick and Flupke, and characters based upon Hergé and E.P. Jacobs.

In the 1946 colorised version, Hergé also included a cameo by Thomson and Thompson, the two detectives that he had first introduced in the fourth Tintin story, Cigars of the Pharaoh (1932–34), which was chronologically set after the Congolese adventure. Adding them to the first page, they are featured in the backdrop, watching a crowd surrounding Tintin as he boards a train and commenting that it "Seems to be a young reporter going to Africa..."[18] In this version, Hergé also inserted illustrated depictions of both himself and his friend Edgar P. Jacobs (who was the colorist who worked with him on the book), into the frame, as members of the crowd seeing Tintin off.[19]

Farr believed that the 1946 color version was a poorer product than the black and white original, having lost its "vibrancy" and "atmosphere" with the new depiction of the Congolese landscape being unconvincing, appearing more like a European zoo than the "parched, dusty expanses of reality."[3] Another Tintinologist, Benoit Peeters, took a more positive attitude towards the 1946 version, commenting that it contained "aesthetic improvements" and a "clarity of composition" due to Hergé's personal development in draughtsmanship, as well as an enhancement in the dialogue, which had become "more lively and fluid."[20]

[edit] Later alterations and releases

Black and white edition of Tintin in the Congo in the English language.

When the Scandinavian publishers of the Adventures of Tintin decided to first release Tintin in the Congo in 1975, they were unhappy with the content of page 56, in which Tintin drills a hole into a rhinoceros, fills it with dynamite, and then blows it up. They asked Hergé to replace this page with an alternate, less violent scene which they believed would be more suitable for their young readership. Hergé, who had come to regret the scenes of animal abuse and big game hunting in the work soon after producing it, eagerly agreed, and the subsequently altered page involved the rhinoceros accidentally firing Tintin's gun while he was asleep and then running off scared as a result. This altered scene was subsequently used in other language publications as well.[21]

Although the 1946 colored version had become the predominant version of the work that was publicly available, Tintinologists and collectors became interested in the original 1931 version, and so it was reissued, in French, in the first volume of the Archives Hergé collection, where it was featured alongside Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in America. This volume of Archives Hergé was published by Casterman in 1973, who then also released Tintin in the Congo as a stand-alone tome in 1982.[9]

Although it had been published in a wide range of languages, including French, Swedish, and German, English publishers refused to publish Tintin in the Congo for many years due to its controversial nature. In the late 1980s, Nick Rodwell, then agent of Studio Hergé in the United Kingdom, told reporters of his intention to finally publish it in English and noted his belief that, by publishing the original 1931 black and white edition, it would cause less controversy than its later 1946 counterpart would.[19] After much debate, it was agreed to publish the 1931 version, 60 years on in 1991, making it the last of the Tintin books to appear in English.[3] The 1946 colour version finally saw publication in English in 2005, when it was released by Egmont Publishing.

[edit] Controversy

[edit] Colonialism and racism

A frame from the 1946 version of the book, featuring the king of the M'Hatuvu angry at his failure in battle against Tintin.

In the latter decades of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st, Tintin in the Congo came under criticism for its depiction of Congolese people, with several campaigners and writers characterising the work as racist due to its stereotypical portrayal of the Congolese as infantile and stupid.[2] Farr highlighted that such accusations against the book only came about decades after its original publication because it was only following the collapse of European colonial rule in Africa during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s that the average western attitude towards Africans changed, becoming less patronising and, in Farr's words, "racist".[3] Tintinologist Harry Thompson argued that Tintin in the Congo should be viewed in the context of European society in the 1930s and 1940s, and that Hergé had not written the book to be "deliberately racist", but merely reflected the average Belgian view of Congolese people at the time, one which was more "patronising" than malevolently racist.[15] Similarly, Tintinologist Jean-Marie Apostolidès maintained that Hergé was not intentionally racist, but that he portrayed the Congolese as being like children, displaying friendliness, naivety, cowardice, and laziness.[22]

Both Farr and literary critic Tom McCarthy noted that Tintin in the Congo was the most popular Tintin adventure among readers on the African continent, particularly in the continent's French-speaking countries.[23][24] In a similar assessment, Thompson noted that the book remained hugely popular in both the Belgian Congo and, after it achieved independence in 1960, in its successor nation-state, Zaire.[1] This however has not prevented it being viewed with anger by certain Congolese people; for example, in 2004, when the Congolese Information Minister Henri Mova Sakanyi described remarks by the Belgian foreign minister critical of the chaos in the Congolese government as "racism and nostalgia for colonialism", he remarked that it was like "Tintin in the Congo all over again."[2][25]

Conservative politician Ann Widdecombe defended the sale of Tintin in the Congo in the face of allegations that it was racist.

In July 2007 the United Kingdom's equal-rights body, the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), called on high-street shops to remove the book from shelves after a complaint by David Enright, a human rights lawyer who came across the book in the children's section of the high-street chain Borders while shopping with his African wife and two sons. The shop later moved the book from the children's section to the area reserved for adult graphic novels. Borders said that it was committed to let its "customers make the choice." Another major British retailer, WHSmith, said that the book was sold on its website but with a label that recommended it for readers aged 16 and over.[26][27][28][29] The CRE's attempts at banning the book were criticised by Conservative Party politician Ann Widdecombe, who remarked that the organisation had more important things to do than regulate the accessibility of historical children's books.[29]

In August 2007 a complaint was filed in Brussels by a Congolese political science student named Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, who claimed that the book was an insult to the Congolese people. Public prosecutors investigated, but the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism warned against political over-correctness.[30] Mondondo later extended his action to France, demanding that the comic be removed from the shelves of bookstores, and it was announced that he would go as far as the European Court of Human Rights in order to make his case.[31] Tintin in the Congo also came under criticism in the United States of America; in October 2007, in response to a complaint by a patron, the Brooklyn Public Library placed the book in its Hunt Collection for Children's Literature, a special collection of 7,000 rare children's books that can only be accessed by appointment.[32][33]

In November 2011, UK book sellers Waterstones removed the book from its children's section amid fears it may "fall into the wrong hands". Publisher Egmont UK also responded to concerns surrounding racism by placing a protective band around the book with a warning about its content, and writing an introduction explaining the historical context of the comic. The moves have been met with a mixed reception.[34]

[edit] Animal welfare

Tintin in the Congo has also been criticised for its treatment of Congolese wildlife, with Tintin taking part in "the wholesale and gratuitous slaughter" of animals by shooting several antelope, killing an ape to wear its skin, injuring an elephant, stoning a buffalo, and (in earlier editions) slaying a rhinoceros with dynamite. Big game hunting was very popular among affluent Europeans who visited Africa during the 1930s, and Tintin reflects this trend during his adventure.[3] Hergé would in later years feel guilty about his portrayal of animals in Tintin in the Congo, becoming an opponent of blood sports, and by the time he had written Cigars of the Pharaoh several years later, he made Tintin meet and befriend a herd of elephants living in the Indian jungle, a far cry from the destruction wrought in his African adventure.[17] When the book was first published in India by the India Book House in 2003, the Indian branch of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals issued a public criticism, with chief functionary Anuradha Sawhney stating that the comic was "replete with instances that send a message to young minds that it is acceptable to be cruel to animals".[35]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ a b Thompson 1991. pp. 41–42.
  2. ^ a b c Cendrowicz 2010.
  3. ^ a b c d e f Farr 2001. p. 22.
  4. ^ Hergé 2005 [1946]. pp. 01–11.
  5. ^ Hergé 2005 [1946]. pp. 11–18.
  6. ^ Hergé 2005 [1946]. pp. 19–28.
  7. ^ Hergé 2005 [1946]. pp. 44.
  8. ^ Hergé 2005 [1946]. pp. 44–52.
  9. ^ a b c d Lofficier and Lofficier 2002. p. 24.
  10. ^ a b Farr 2001. p. 21.
  11. ^ Thompson 1991. p. 33.
  12. ^ Lofficier and Lofficier 2002. p. 25.
  13. ^ Apostolidès 2010. pp. 12–16.
  14. ^ Farr 2001. p. 21–22.
  15. ^ a b Thompson 1991. p. 40.
  16. ^ Lofficier and Lofficier 2002. p. 26.
  17. ^ a b Thompson 1991. p. 41.
  18. ^ a b c Farr 2001. p. 25.
  19. ^ a b Thompson 1991. p. 42.
  20. ^ Peeters 1988. p. 30–31.
  21. ^ Farr 2001. p. 23, 25.
  22. ^ Apostolidès 2010. p. 14.
  23. ^ Farr 2001. p. 27.
  24. ^ McCarthy 2004. p. 37.
  25. ^ "DR Congo slams 'Tintin' minister". BBC News. 22 October 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3944591.stm. 
  26. ^ BBC News 2007.
  27. ^ Sky News 2007.
  28. ^ Fernandez 2007.
  29. ^ a b Beckford 2007.
  30. ^ "Investigation into racism in "Tintin"". Expatica. 7 August 2007. http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=24&story_id=42631. Retrieved 7 August 2007. 
  31. ^ article on the case on lefigaro.fr, website of the French newspaper Le Figaro
  32. ^ Leigh Cowan 2009.
  33. ^ About the Hunt Collection of Children's Literature
  34. ^ "Tintin banned from children's shelves over 'racism' fears". The Telegraph. 3 November 2011. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/8866991/Tintin-banned-from-childrens-shelves-over-racism-fears.html. Retrieved 3 November 2011. 
  35. ^ Chopra 2003.

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