Is it a good thing or a bad thing that Tintin in the Congo is currently sitting at number five in the Amazon best sellers list? This follows everyone suddenly noticing that a book first published between 1930 and 1931 is actually a bit racist. I don’t believe that this is particularly new news, and tend to agree with Giles Foden writing in today’s Guardian – I can’t find a link but essentially he says that it should be removed from the children’s section but should still be made available, and lists some other classics that have also been accused of racism, fascism or other labels. But the story certainly seems to have reinvigorated interest in the title.
Tintin Storms the Charts
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One response to “Tintin Storms the Charts”
Yes, Tintin in the Congo is “a bit racist”.
As a childhood fan of Tintin, I was recently given Tintin: The Complete Companion, which is quite a decent book that goes into a lot of detail about Hergé.
For example – did you know that he never left Belgium – and all the detail in the books came from magazines; that ‘Tintin in the Congo’ was the last book to be translated into English (it only made it here in 1991); and that the author thought it very racist later in years. Racist, mainly, because of its colonial ties – and also a little less than PC because Tintin does appear to kill rather a lot of animals. Indeed, his Scandinavian publisher removed a page where Tintin drilled a hole into a rhinocerous, inserted some dynamite, and – literally – blew his head off.
Many other things were removed and left out of the book, too, in its conversion from black and white to colour in the 1930s; even then, attitudes had changed.
This is a historical document. Hergé admitted later that “I was fed on the prejudices of the bourgeois society in which I moved”. Fair comment. But it’s not right to remove it, just as Mein Kampf and other pieces of literature are still available. Political correctness is one thing; censorship quite another.