This is supposed to be an adventure comic. Looking for a nuanced portrait of life in the Colonial Belgian Congo would be like looking for a scholarly study of archeology and Middle Eastern Geopolitics prior to WWII in Indiana Jones
I see some dated depictions of blacks but no monkeys
Liberals aways bring monkeys into these things which to me says that there is projection going on
Love love love Tintin.
Librarians get worked up over ‘freedom of speech’ observations but are very quick to squelch dissenting views.
I think someone was badly confused, as the book doesn’t really depict Africans as monkeys. What seems to have happened is that the Africans are depicted in a cartoony manner (standard for the era) that was interpreted by modern writers unfamiliar with the caricatural style of the past as monkey-like. It would have been more accurate to say the book depicted Africans using insulting or demeaning stereotypes. The monkey interpretation is simply wrong.
The history of the book is garbled, too. It goes back some 80 years, yes, but the version shown here is the updated one that was redrawn after World War II. The original was done when Herge was in his early 20s and still very crude as an artist, the book was filled with youthful excess (Tintin seemingly slaughters half the animals in Africa playing big game hunter), and there was some rah-rah Belgium nationalism that no longer played very well. Unfortunately, the depiction of Africans wasn’t much improved but the book was probably unsalvageable in that regard as far as American sensibilities are concerned.
It was the second book in the series. The first book, TINTIN IN THE LAND OF THE SOVIETS, still makes leftists spew venom (it was never redrawn or reissued as part of the regular series, and while available as a facsimile reprint, it’s more a historical curiosity than an “official” Tintin book). The third book was TINTIN IN AMERICA, which opens (at least in the original) with the words, “In Chicago, where criminals of all kinds reign supreme...” (The plot of TINTIN IN AFRICA had to do with Al Capone trying to muscle in on the Belgian Congo diamond business, and in the next book Tintin went to America to confront the gangsters directly.) Readers will note that in TINTIN IN AFRICA, Herge hailed Belgium’s colonial policies in Africa as noble work bringing modern medicine and education to the benighted natives but in TINTIN IN AMERICA he blasted Americans for treating Indians badly.
It should be remembered that the 22 or so TINTIN books were published over a span of some 45 years, from about 1930 to the last one in 1976, and the series changed a lot over time. Also, Herge practically reinvented the series after the war by redrawing and updating the older books while continuing to produce new ones. The early books generally available now aren’t the really old versions (which have been reprinted for the enthusiast market in all their creaky old glory, but you’d have to be a French-reading fan to obtain them). In any case, it took serveral books for Herge to really find his footing. Fans might disagree on when the series really “got good,” but it was probably five or six books in. Meeting a Chinese artist when he decided to do an adventure set in China (”The Blue Lotus”) is considered one of the turning points, as he became friends with the artist and began to realize it wasn’t enough to just send Tintin to some exotic place and have him have slapstick encounters with funny stereotypes of the natives. The series doesn’t really take off until Captain Haddock is introduced in the ninth book (”The Crab with the Golden Claws,” and some have argued that Haddock took over the series and is probably the real hero after that). By that time Herge had developed as an artist and shed his youthful excesses, and was delivering solid adventure stories mixed with comedy.
Herge was either canny enough to relaize Tintin couldn’t be the voice of conservative Catholic Belgium in the post-war era and had to be a more universal character, or he changed himself in some ways. I think it was a bit of both (he also had a lingering reputation of being a collaborationist to fight — he had continued to draw Tintin during the German occupation for a pro-Occupation newspaper). I also think Herge was one of those people who went along with the times and reflected what was around him. The world had changed after the war and Herge went along with that.
By the time Herge was negotiating with Spielberg about a possible Tintin movie in the early 80s, a lot of water had gone under the bridge. Herge had been accused of being a racist, an anti-Semite, and a Nazi collaborator in his time, but he was convinced Spielberg was the only one who could do Tintin justice as a major motion picture. (There had been a couple of live-action Tintin movies before, but they’re pretty dire...) It can also be seen that Spielberg has been working on this project for an awfully long time, since Herge died in 1983. And no doubt that as the Tintin movie project moves along, all of the ancient history will be dredged up as though it was just as current as the later and better part of the Tintin series.