The text in its context. It is the maxim that accompanies the album that Hergé published in 1931, starring Tintin (after the many years unpublished Tintin in the land of the Soviets). The famous journalist, who has populated the imagination of several generations over the course of a century, got off to a bad start. Tintin in the Congo, with reference to the then Belgian colony in Africa, has been repeatedly accused of racism and supremacism, and has even been banned in some countries.
Now it is back in the news because, with surprising discretion, it has been republished in French, but with some notable new features. The first, the change in the design of the cover. The reporter no longer appears driving a vehicle with his black assistant, but plays a vignette in which Tintin and a lion frighten each other when they discover each other.
The news broke thanks to the AFP agency, which warned about these developments, although they occurred on November 1, but they had achieved absolute secrecy. “Without much publicity, Tintín au Congo was relaunched in November in a new, colorful version, with a new cover but, above all, for the first time, with a preface that puts this album in context”, says AFP. The album recovers the 1931 version and is sold in a box set called Les colorisés, which also includes Tintin au pays des Soviets (1930) and Tintin en Amérique (1932).
The change in the cover drawing is already a statement of intent, but the most significant is the prologue, which contextualizes the historical moment in which it was published, but is excessively justifiable of Hergé’s work.
The 1946 album version was already heavily revised. In this version, Tintin gives a math class to Congolese schoolchildren. Now, on the other hand, in the original colored edition, the lesson on “Your homeland: Belgium” that the reporter gave to the children, a kind of National Spirit Formation from a hundred years ago, is recovered.
The foreword is signed by, who chairs the association Els Amics d’Hergé, and who defends the point of view of the creator of Tintin: “It has been said that Hergé hatefully caricatured the Congolese. Is it racist? (…) He makes fun of everyone, both white and black”, he writes in the preface.
Goddin explains to AFP: “We are racist from the moment we want to denigrate, degrade the other, but this does not happen with Tintin in the Congo. Of course, there are stereotypes, caricatures. Hergé insists on drawing plump lips, snotty noses, like many caricaturists of the time, but for me, even though the border between caricature and racism is fragile, he doesn’t cross it”.
The agency also provides the testimony of the historian Pascal Blanchard: “This preface is very questionable. He tells us that Hergé would be a simple sponge of his time. Hergé made the political decision to ignore the sources that describe the violence of colonization. And Philippe Goddin exploits a paradox: showing that Hergé is the closest to the photos that come to him from the Congo, he considers that the iconography about the colonies, in a country with a colonial propaganda agency, would become a source of truth No, it’s propaganda”, he concludes.
