Court will hear case to ban racist version of Tintin adventure

A CONGOLESE-born campaigner finally won his day in court yesterday in his 4-year bid to ban a Tintin book, arguing that its cartoons of Africans were racist.

Mbutu Mondondo Bienvenu launched a legal case in 2007 against the book Tintin in the Congo but was only able to start arguing his case before a judge after months of legal argument.

“What poses a problem today is not [author] Hergé, it’s the commercialisation of a cartoon book which manifestly diffuses ideas based on racial superiority,” his lawyer Ahmed L’Hedim told the court.

Mr Mbutu Mondondo initially brought criminal charges over the book created by Belgian author and illustrator Georges Remi, better known as Hergé.

However, after lengthy delays, his legal team started a civil case last year. That case has been bogged down by a dispute over which court was empowered to hear the case.

The book was published in 1931 and Mr Mbutu Mondondo is taking action against a modern version of the original. Openly racist language was removed in subsequent editions.

The English language version carries a warning to readers that its contents could be offensive and that it should be seen in the context of its time.

If the court decides against an outright ban, the complainant wants a similar warning placed on the editions in French and Dutch sold in Belgium.

Moulinsart, the foundation which holds the Tintin copyright, has refused to attach a warning. It says many works could be accused of discrimination.

Publisher Casterman and Moulinsart will present their counter-arguments at a hearing in Brussels on 14 October, with a ruling expected in about two months.

But Alain Berenboom, a lawyer representing Moulinsart and Casterman, said: “Asking a tribunal to make a warning is a form of censorship.”

He warned that if the trend continued “we’ll be asking to ban works by Charles Dickens which contain anti-Semitic undertones”.

Mr Mbutu Mondondo’s arguments won support in 2007 from the UK Commission for Racial Equality, which ruled that Tintin in the Congo contained “hideous racial prejudice”. The volume has since been sold in Britain with a sticker warning.

Tintin in the Congo first appeared in Belgian newspaper Le Vingtieme Siecle as a comic strip in 1930-31, part of the popular Adventures of Tintin series.

This month sees the eagerly anticipated release of director Stephen Spielberg’s animated film The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. The director says he’d never heard of Tintin until 1981, when it was mentioned in a French review of his film Raiders of the Lost Ark. But early Tintin adventures ran into frequent complaints of racism, with content toned down by modern editors. In Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Bolshevik revolutionaries were portrayed as villains. Many of the black characters in Tintin in America were re-coloured over fears of racial slurs while The Shooting Star originally had an odious American villain with the Jewish surname of Blumenstein.

The tale of Tintin’s trip to what was then the Belgian Congo, where colonial rulers have since been accused of horrendous abuses, has been particularly controversial, with its content attacked for colonialism and racism as well as violence towards animals. It depicts him talking to children in a classroom about “your fatherland, Belgium”, watching two villagers fighting over a straw hat, and meeting a black woman who bows, saying the “white mister is big juju man”.

Hergé toned down his work when it was redrawn in colour in 1946. “I was nourished by the prejudices of the environment in which I lived. I only knew what people said about this country at that time: that negroes are all children and it’s a good job we’re there,” he said. “And I drew them, these Africans, according to those criteria in a pure paternalistic spirit.”