Background

Georges Remi—best known under the pen name Hergé—was the editor and illustrator of Le Petit Vingtième ("The Little Twentieth"),^[8] a children's supplement to Le Vingtième Siècle ("The Twentieth Century"), a staunchly Roman Catholic, conservative Belgian newspaper based in Hergé's native Brussels. Run by the Abbé Norbert Wallez, the paper described itself as a "Catholic Newspaper for Doctrine and Information" and disseminated a far-right, fascist viewpoint.^[9] According to Harry Thompson, such political ideas were common in Belgium at the time, and Hergé's milieu was permeated with conservative ideas revolving around "patriotism, Catholicism, strict morality, discipline, and naivety".^[10]

In 1929, Hergé began The Adventures of Tintin comic strip for Le Petit Vingtième, a series about the exploits of a fictional Belgian reporter named Tintin. Following the success of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, serialised weekly in Le Petit Vingtième from January 1929 to May 1930, Hergé wanted to send Tintin to the United States. Wallez insisted he write a story set in the Belgian Congo, then a Belgian colony and today the Democratic Republic of the Congo.^[12] Belgian children learned about the Congo in school, and Wallez hoped to encourage colonialist and missionary zeal in his readership.^[13] He believed that the Belgian colonial administration needed promotion at a time when memories "were still fairly fresh" of the 1928 visit to the colony by the Belgian King Albert and Queen Elisabeth.^[14] He also hoped that some of his readers would be inspired to work in the Congo.^[15]

Hergé characterised Wallez's instructions in a sarcastic manner, saying Wallez referred to the Congo as "our beautiful colony which has great need of us, tarantara, tarantaraboom".^[16] He already had some experience in illustrating Congolese scenes; three years previously, Hergé had provided two illustrations for the newspaper that appeared in an article celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Henry Morton Stanley's expedition to the Congo. In one of these, Hergé depicted a native Congolese bowing before a European, a scene that he repeated in Tintin in the Congo.^[17]

As in Land of the Soviets, where Hergé had based his information about the Soviet Union almost entirely on a single source, in Tintin in the Congo he used limited source material to learn about the country and its people. He based the story largely on literature written by missionaries, with the only added element being that of the diamond smugglers, possibly adopted from the "Jungle Jim-type serials".^[18] Hergé visited the Colonial Museum of Tervuren, examining their ethnographic collections of Congolese artefacts, including costumes of the Leopard Men.^[19] He adopted hunting scenes from André Maurois's novel The Silence of Colonel Bramble, while his animal drawings were inspired by Benjamin Rabier's prints.^[17] He also listened to tales of the colony from some of his colleagues who had been there, but disliked their stories, later claiming: "I didn't like the colonists, who came back bragging about their exploits. But I couldn't prevent myself from seeing the Blacks as big children, either".^[15]

Original publication, 1930–31

Tintin in the Congo was serialised under the French title of Tintin au Congo in Le Petit Vingtième from 5 June 1930 to 11 June 1931; it was syndicated to the French Catholic newspaper Cœurs Vaillants.^[20] Drawn in black and white, it followed the same formula employed in Land of the Soviets, remaining "essentially plotless" according to the Hergé specialist Michael Farr, and consisting of largely unrelated events that Hergé improvised each week.^[21] Hergé later commented on the process of writing these early adventures, stating: "The Petit Vingtième came out on Wednesday evening, and I often didn't have a clue on Wednesday morning how I was going to get Tintin out of the predicament I had put him in the previous week".^[16] The strip's visual style was similar to that of Land of the Soviets.^[22] In the first instalment of Tintin in the Congo, Hergé featured Quick and Flupke, two young boys from Brussels whom he had recently introduced in another Le Petit Vingtième comic strip, in the crowd of people saying goodbye to Tintin.^[23]

Like Land of the Soviets, Tintin in the Congo was popular in Belgium. On the afternoon of 9 July 1931, Wallez repeated the publicity stunt he had used when Soviets ended by having a young actor, Henry de Doncker, dress up as Tintin in colonial gear and appear in Brussels and then Liège, accompanied by 10 African bearers and an assortment of exotic animals hired from a zoo. Co-organised with the Bon Marché department store, the event attracted 5,000 spectators in Brussels.^[24] In 1931, Brussels-based Éditions de Petit Vingtième collected the story together into a single volume, and Casterman published a second edition in 1937.^[20] By 1944 the book had been reprinted seven times, and had outsold each of the other seven books in the series.^{[lower-alpha 4][25]} The series' success led Wallez to renegotiate Hergé's contract, giving him a higher salary and the right to work from home.^[26]

Second version, 1946

In the 1940s, after Hergé's popularity increased, he redrew many of the original black-and-white Tintin stories in colour using the ligne claire ("clear line")^{[lower-alpha 5]} drawing style he had developed, so that they fitted in visually with the newer Adventures of Tintin that he had produced.^[28] Hergé first made some changes in this direction in 1940, when the story was serialised in the Dutch-language Het Laatste Nieuws.^[29]

At Casterman's prompting, Tintin in the Congo was subsequently fully re-drawn, and the new version was published in 1946.^[28] As a part of this modification, Hergé cut the page length from 110 plates to the standard 62 pages, as suggested by the publisher Casterman. He also made several changes to the story, cutting many of the references to Belgium and colonial rule.^[28] For example, in the scene where Tintin teaches Congolese school children about geography, he states in the 1930–31 version: "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.^[28] Hergé also changed the character of Jimmy MacDuff, the owner of the leopard that attacks Tintin, from a black manager of the Great American Circus into a white "supplier of the biggest zoos in Europe".^[28]

In the 1946 colour version, Hergé added a cameo appearance from Thomson and Thompson, the two detectives that he had 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, Hergé featured them 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 ..."^[14] In the same frame, Hergé inserted depictions of himself and his friend Edgar P. Jacobs (the book's colourist) into the crowd seeing Tintin off.^[30]

Later alterations and releases

When Tintin in the Congo was first released by the series' Scandinavian publishers in 1975, they objected to page 56, where Tintin drills a hole into a live rhinoceros, fills it with dynamite, and blows it up. They asked Hergé to replace this page with a less violent scene, which they believed would be more suitable for children. Hergé agreed, as he regretted the scenes of big-game hunting in the work soon after producing it. The altered page involved the rhinoceros running away unharmed after accidentally knocking down and triggering Tintin's gun.^[31]

Although publishers worldwide had made it available for many years, English publishers refused to publish Tintin in the Congo because of its perceived racist content. In the late 1980s, Nick Rodwell, then agent of Studios Hergé in the United Kingdom, told reporters of his intention to finally publish it in English and stated his belief that publishing the original 1931 black and white edition would cause less controversy than releasing the 1946 colour version.^[30] After more delay, in 1991—sixty years after its original 1931 publication—it was the last of The Adventures of Tintin to see publication in English.^[11] The 1946 colour version eventually appeared in English in 2005, published in Britain by Egmont.^[32]

Racism

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, several campaigners and writers characterised Tintin in the Congo as racist due to its portrayal of the Congolese as infantile and stupid.^[41] According to McCarthy, Hergé depicted the Congolese as "good at heart but backwards and lazy, in need of European mastery".^[42] There had been no such controversy when originally published,^[43] because it was only following the decolonisation of Africa, which occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, that Western attitudes towards indigenous Africans shifted.^[11] Harry Thompson argued that Tintin in the Congo must 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". Thompson argued that the story reflected the average Belgian view of Congolese people at the time, one that was more "patronising" than malevolent.^[35] Apostolidès supported this idea,^[44] as did Peeters, who asserted that "Hergé was no more racist than the next man".^[15] After meeting Hergé in the 1980s, Farr commented, "You couldn't have met someone who was more open and less racist."^[45]

Contrastingly, Assouline stated that in 1930s Belgium, Hergé would have had access to literature by the likes of André Gide and Albert Londres that was critical of the colonial regime. Assouline claimed that Hergé instead chose not to read such reports because they conflicted with the views of his conservative milieu.^[46] Laurence Grove—President of the International Bande Dessinée Society and an academic at the University of Glasgow—concurred, remarking that Hergé adhered to prevailing societal trends in his work, and that "[w]hen it was fashionable to be a colonial racist, that's what he was".^[45] Comic book historian Mark McKinney noted that other Franco-Belgian comic artists of the same period had chosen to depict the native Africans in a more favourable light, citing the examples of Jijé's 1939 work Blondin et Cirage (Blondy and Shoe-Black), in which the protagonists are adopted brothers, one white, the other black, and Tif et Tondu, which was serialised in Spirou from 1939 to 1940 and in which the Congolese aid the Belgians against their American antagonists.^[47]

Farr and McCarthy stated that Tintin in the Congo was the most popular Tintin adventure in Francophone Africa.^[48] According to Thompson, the book remained hugely popular in the Congo even after the country achieved independence in 1960.^[49] Nevertheless, government figures in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have criticised the book. In 2004, after the Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs Karel De Gucht described President Joseph Kabila's provisional DRC government as incompetent, Congolese Information Minister Henri Mova Sakanyi accused him of "racism and nostalgia for colonialism", remarking that it was like "Tintin in the Congo all over again".^[50] The South African comics writer Anton Kannemeyer has parodied the perceived racist nature of the book to highlight what he sees as the continuing racist undertones of South African society. In his Pappa in Afrika (2010), a satire of Tintin in the Congo, he portrays Tintin as an Afrikaner with racist views of indigenous Africans.^[51]

Hunting and animal cruelty

Tintin in the Congo shows Tintin taking part in what Farr described as "the wholesale and gratuitous slaughter" of animals; over the course of the Adventure, Tintin shoots several antelope, kills an ape to wear its skin, rams a rifle vertically into a crocodile's open mouth, kills an elephant for ivory, stones a buffalo, and (in earlier editions) drills a hole into a rhinoceros before planting dynamite in its body, blowing it up from the inside.^[11] Such scenes reflect the popularity of big-game hunting among affluent visitors in Sub-Saharan Africa during the 1930s.^[11] Hergé later felt guilty about his portrayal of animals in Tintin in the Congo and became an opponent of blood sports; when he wrote Cigars of the Pharaoh (1934), he had Tintin befriend a herd of elephants living in the Indian jungle.^[62]

Philippe Goddin stated that the scene in which Tintin shoots a herd of antelope was "enough to upset even the least ecological reader" in the 21st century.^[63] When India Book House first published the book in India in 2006, its national branch of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals issued a public criticism, and chief functionary Anuradha Sawhney stated that the book was "replete with instances that send a message to young minds that it is acceptable to be cruel to animals".^[64]