Tintin accused of colonial racism
Tintin is under investigation by the Belgium’s state prosecutor after a Congolese student, Mondondo Bienvenu, took legal action claiming Hergé’s controversial Tintin In The Congo “constitutes an insult for all the Congolese” and should be banned. He says, “it is propaganda for colonialism.”Mr Mondondo Bienvenu is demanding the book be withdrawn from the market and has launched a civil action pressing for symbolic damages of one euro from Tintin’s Belgian publishers Moulinsart. The Brussels office of the state prosecutor has confirmed that the case is being taken seriously. The Belgian legal action follows the British where race watchdogs pulled the book from children’s shelves and attacked the Tintin cartoons for making black Africans “look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles”. In the cartoon hero’s defence, Moulinsar argues that the book “must be seen as a document of the time. In his portrayal of the Belgian Congo, the young Hergé reflects the colonial attitudes of the time. He depicted the African people according to the bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period.” Georges Remi, the Tintin cartoonist reworked the book in 1946 to remove references to Congo as Belgian colony. That was the moment all the racist comments should have been removed, says Mr. Bienvenu.
