‘Tintin in the Congo’ reissue questioned
BRUSSELS: Tintin will mark his 90th birthday this year with a return to controversy as his Belgian creator’s heirs release a new edition of
a work from 1930 that draws accusations of racism.
The boy reporter’s adventure in the then Belgian colony was among the first Tintin stories to be serialised by the Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, who wrote under the pen name Herge. His widow, Fanny Rodwell’s firm is launching a digital version in to celebrate 90 years since the strip cartoon character first appeared in a Brussels newspaper in 1929.
The publishers dismissed suggestions the story, which features caricatured black Africans with fat, red lips and in loincloths, was problematic.
‘‘Dialogue is most important and the work of deconstruction, decolonisation, is just as important,’’ a publisher’s spokesman said yesterday.
However, one Congolese, Brusselsbased comicbook artist Barly Baruti, said he felt that bringing out a new edition of the work at a time when nationalist and racist groups appeared to be on the rise in Europe was questionable.
‘‘We really ask ourselves if it is the right moment,’’ he said.
A Belgian court rejected an attempt a decade ago to have the book banned, saying it reflected the colonial attitudes of its time and there was no evidence that Remi, who died in 1983 aged 75, had held racist views. — Reuters