The text in its context. It is the maxim that accompanies the first album that Hergé published in 1923, starring Tintin (after the unpublished Tintin in the Land of the Soviets for many years). The famous journalist, who has populated the imagination of several generations over a century, started off on the wrong foot.
Tintin in the Congo, referring 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, Éditions Moulinsart has republished it, but with some notable new features. The first, the change of the cover drawing.
It no longer appears the reporter driving a vehicle with his black assistant, but instead reproduces a vignette in which Tintin and a lion scare each other when they discover each other.
The news has broken thanks to the AFP agency, which has warned about these developments, although they already occurred on November 1, but they had been done with absolute secrecy.
"Without much publicity, Tintin au Congo was re-released in November in a new colored version, with a new cover but, above all, for the first time, with a preface that puts this album in context," notes AFP. The album revives 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 declaration of intentions, but the most significant thing is the prologue, which contextualizes the historical moment in which it was published, but is excessively justifying Hergé's work.
The 1946 album version was already heavily revised. In it, Tintin gives a mathematics class to Congolese schoolchildren. Now, however, in the original colored edition, the lesson on "Your homeland: Belgium" that the reporter gave to the children is recovered, a kind of Formation of the National Spirit from a hundred years ago.
The prologue is signed by Philippe Goddin, who chairs the association The Friends of Hergé, and who defends the point of view of the creator of Tintin: "It has been said that Hergé hatefully caricatured the Congolese. Is he racist? (...) "He gleefully mocks 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, which does not happen with Tintin in the Congo. Of course, there are stereotypes, caricatures. Hergé insists on big lips, flat noses, like many caricaturists of the time, but for me, although the border between caricature and racism is fragile, he does not cross it.
The agency also provides the testimony of historian Pascal Blanchard: "This preface is very questionable. It 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 He abuses a paradox: by showing us 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. "It's propaganda," he concludes.
