The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
— L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
Among the most respected mainstream American comics ever produced are the war stories written and edited (and often drawn) by Harvey Kurtzman for the EC Comics titles Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat between 1950 and 1953. 
EC publisher Bill Gaines (left) with Kurtzman
After three installments criticising Hergé for rampant racism and xenophobia, I uneasily picture his ghost appearing before me, with a quizzical smile.
« So, » says the ghost, « you’ve really dragged me through the mud, eh ? But what about yourself, Alex? Are you a racist?”
“No!” I answer. ”No, but…”
New York, Washington Square Park. I loiter around a chess game – I’m a rotten player, but I enjoy it as a spectator sport. Somebody grabs my arm—a muscular young Black man. I tense up with a fight-or-flight boost of adrenaline…
“You want a game?” he asks.
He didn’t want to mug me, he wanted to play chess.
Many another middle-class, middle-aged White man can attest to such embarrassing moments, where — despite professed liberalism– racist instincts seem to kick in at the worst times. It’s good that our conscious selves master our subconscious. The fact is, for one of my generation (I was born in 1954), urban African-Americans were synonymous with danger; an unofficial apartheid divided the city; and despite the fact that I was never hurt or even threatened by a Black man (the few times I was mugged were by Whites), I had internalised this detestable racist prejudice, one that went unspoken
Yet, would I have reacted the same had the incident occurred in Paris? I doubt it.
I was born to a French father and an American mother, growing up bi-cultural in America with long stays in France, where I now live. Like many bi-culturals, I have something of a split personality: there’s an American Alex and a French Alex.
French Alex has no doubt internalised quite different prejudices towards Black people. Consider this poster for a chocolate drink known to all French kids:
That soldier is a Tirailleur Sénégalais, one of hundreds of thousands of colonial soldiers sent to the front in World War One. Note his joyful laugh, over his exclamation “Y’a bon!”, which can roughly be translated as “Sho’nuff good!” The slogan is still heard as a racist taunt.
This was the French cliché of the Black man: a merry, childlike creature eager to serve his master. And I wonder if somewhere deep in my subconscious, that stereotype shamefully thrives.
(The image itself is still used:)
This is the context in which we should consider Tintin au Congo, and Hergé’s various racist lapses: they won’t in themselves convert a kid to racism, but they will confirm the mentally and morally lazy stereotypes that pervade every culture. And it’s hard to underestimate the ubiquity of Tintin in Europe. So, the librarians who remove Tintin au Congo to the adult stacks are doing their duty.
Myself, I got a bit of a jolt reading Tintin en Amérique. Even as an eight-year-old, I knew this America was just a comic fantasy:
…and no American I knew was remotely like the greed-crazed, thuggish citizens depicted therein.
I was, for once, at the sharp end of Hergés stick.
So, Tintin to the incinerator?
No. Other powerful and positive forces of Hergé’s approach to the Other are the attraction and wonder of foreign lands, foreign people. How many youths have set out to explore the world inspired by Tintin? And aren’t the values embodied by the plucky little reporter worthwhile ones—courage, loyalty, justice?
Besides which, the Tintin albums are simply wonderful yarns, crammed with suspense, comedy that is often uproarious, lovely art. They are about as fun as comics can get.
As for Chang, the young student who opened Hergé’s eyes to Chinese civilisation, he returned to Shanghai in 1936 to open a drawing school, which he managed for thirty years. He was purged by the Cultural Revolution, in which he suffered badly. Hergé never stopped trying to help him, and finally was able to bring him back to Belgium in 1981. The two friends were speechless at their reunion, 44 years after their separation.
Herge and Chang in 1931…
…Chang and Herge in 1981.
Let’s conclude where we started four chapters ago : with Tintin au Congo.
How do Africans feel about it?
It is, in fact, a perennial seller in Francophone Africa. Hergé was delighted that it was serialised in 1969 in the prestigious African Zaïre magazine.
That may sound like another depressing example of internalising one’s oppression…but not so fast. Here’s what Zaïre had to say about the strip:
“If certain caricatures of the Congolese people in Tintin au Congo make White people laugh, they also made the Congolese readers laugh because they found plenty to mock in the White man who saw them that way!”
In other words, they are laughing at, not with, the whites.
Three examples of African appropriation of Hergé’s imagery:
Sculpture from Kinshasha, Zaire
Kinshasha street mural
From Benin: Tintin, Congolese, and a missionary.
The entire Tintin in Otherland series is here.
The entire Tintin in Otherland series is here.
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The immediate aftermath of the war was harsh for Hergé, even though he could be accused, at worst, of passivity.
He learned his lesson – what political satire there was in his books would henceforth be muted; minorities treated with greater respect. The books would be revised and whitewashed.
Of course, there was little that could be done to arrange Tintin au Congo. The Black’s pidgin was made somewhat more grammatical. And, tellingly, the album was “de-Belgified”. References to Belgium and Tintin’s own ‘Belgianness’ were excised.
This can partly be due to the great winds of de-colonisation that were stirring in the postwar world that Hergé sensed; more likely, with Tintin becoming more and more an international success, Hergé was loath to keep his hero tied down to one nationality. (Tintin au Congo was renamed Tim-tim em Angola by his Portuguese publisher – Angola being, of course, Portugal’s colony – and Tintin dans la Brousse — Tintin in the Bush – by one French publisher.)
Note the difference between the 1931 (top) and 1946 (bottom) versions.
Originally, Tintin was dispensing a geography lesson: “My dear friends, I shall speak to you today about your homeland: Belgium!” In 1946, he’s giving a maths lesson.
We’ve already seen how Hergé whitened the Blacks in his pre-war albums. He was to go further and de-Judaise his Jews. Blumenstein became Bohlwinkel in L’Ile Mystérieuse. And he went even further with Tintin au pays de l’or noir.
This adventure takes place in the Middle East, starting in Palestine. The album was first begun in 1939, when Palestine was under British mandate, then set aside when Belgium was invaded—obviously a bad time to show sympathetic British cops. The story was reworked and published in 1950.
The Stern group and the Irgun were escalating an often violent campaign to drive the British out and establish a Jewish state. In the album, a sub-plot has Tintin mixing it up with the British police and members of the Irgun due to a case of mistaken identity.
The Jews in this book are treated neutrally, even sympathetically.
Captured Irgun militants
However, at the request of his British publisher, Methuen, Hergé excised Palestine and Jews from the book : Palestine becomes the fictional Khemed, Haifa is now Khemkhâh, and the British police are Arabs; the fight for Israel becomes a mere power struggle between different factions. It is noteworthy that Hergé made these changes as late as 1971, showing an ongoing hypersensitivity to any possible accusation of racism, even when unjustified.
He was especially leery of charges that his master villain, Roberto Rastapopoulos, was an anti-Semitic caricature:
« Rastapopoulos, for me,” wrote Hergé, “is more or less Greek, a shady Levantine character, without a country, that is without faith or ethical code. Another detail, he is not Jewish!”
The oily “Levantine” is, of course, another nasty stereotype; and the contempt shown for the cosmopolitan is another reactionary mainstay.
Already, during the war years, Hergé had switched to innocuous escapism for his books. Le secret de la ‘Licorne’/Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge are grand treasure-hunts in the South Seas. The last of the wartime books was also meant to be an escape from the troubled times, involving neutral South America : Les sept Boules de Cristal, a two-part adventure paired with its sequel Le Temple du Soleil.
This is one of the more interesting books from our standpoint. It shows Hergé slowly being weaned from the xenophobia and racism that marred so much of his earlier work; but the process is far from completed.
Basically, it’s a variation on the “curse of Tutankhamen” chestnut, with Peru and Incas taking the place of Egypt and Pharaohs. The scientists who have brought the mummy of the Inca Rascar Capac to Europe are being struck down by a mysterious illness. They are in fact being targeted for punishment for blasphemy by descendants of the Incas living in a secret Andean enclave. When Professor Tournesol is kidnapped, Tintin and Haddock follow his captors to South America, where they are taken prisoner and sentenced to die. Tintin saves the day by the old “eclipse” ruse, terrifying the natives by seeming to blot out the sun. Our friends are released with a warning.
The first thing that strikes one is that the villains here aren’t really villains. They have an authentic grievance against the White man, who comes and despoils their heritage. As one character remarks to Tintin , how would we feel if Egyptian or Peruvian archaeologists came to Europe and opened the tombs of our kings to rob them? Hergé was beginning to empathise with the so-called savage; quite an improvement on the album L’oreille cassée, wherein Amazonian Indians are portrayed as weird and barbarous.
In Peru, Tintin picks up another sidekick of the Chang type, an Indian child named Zorrino. Tintin rescues him from a beating by two White bullies:
Zorrino is brave, loyal and dignified.
Overall, then, we can see that the Indians—the Other – are treated with a measure of respect.
And yet, they remain the Other, an insidious source of dread. The avenging Incas are lured to Europe by the stolen mummy: it’s as much a contamination as a curse. Keep away from the Other, and keep the Other away from us.
Tintin’s ruse would never have worked: the Quechua Incas were superb astronomers. It is insulting to suppose them stupid enough to fall for it.
Finally, the trappings of exoticism remain, alluring, alienating:
Hergé himself was changing. His former reactionary colleagues were no longer there to influence him ; his assistants included such cosmopolitan men as artists E.P.Jacobs or Jacques Martin (who assured Hergé of the reality of the death camps, which he’d seen.)
The grip of Catholicism on his was relaxing; in time, he would become an agnostic, fascinated by Buddhism and especially Taoism. He collected modern and contemporary art: Calder, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Frank Stella.
Herge with Andy Warhol, who cited him as an influence
He travelled extensively—finally discovering the foreign parts he’d drawn for decades. Hergé was evolving.
Not that he didn’t slip up. In Coke en Stock (The Red Sea sharks), the Black victims of the slavers are shown to be dignified in their Muslim faith, but fairly stupid as well.
Up till this point, one might suppose that Hergé’s turn away from racism and xenophobia was dictated as much by political fears and commercial considerations. His next album—considered by many (including me) to be his finest work—would prove that his personal evolution was sincere. And, fittingly, it would feature again Chang, the young Chinese who first opened Hergé’s eyes to other cultures.
In Tintin au Tibet, again, there is no villain: the adversary is nature itself, in the forbidding snows of the Himalayas. The Tibetans are depicted with admiration and respect, whether sherpa guides:
or lamas :
or kids:
But the ultimate image of the Other is that of the Monster, such as the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman :
Yet we come to learn that the Yeti is a being of kindness, even love.
Hergé took the side of the Other in Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, wherein a group of Roma (“Gypsies”) are unjustly accused of theft. Haddock protects them and gives them shelter, though Hergé wisely shows them to be skeptical.
And in Hergé’s last album, Tintin et les Picaros, we can feel his indignation at the treatment meted out to the Amazon natives, deliberately kept enslaved by the White man with lashings of free alcohol .
So, yes, the man matured and evolved beyond his prejudices.
Can I say the same for myself?
Next instalment: the Tintin reader on trial.
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The entire Tintin in Otherland series is here.
Wherever you look, you come face-to-face with the Other.
Other race, other religion, other sex, other age, other individual… you name it.
Reactions to the Other are complex and often self-contradictory: they run the gamut from instinctive loathing to fascinated attraction. The same person may be viciously hostile to, say, Indian immigrants, yet long to visit the Taj Mahal. (Excellent examples of this paradox are found in Edward Said’s book Orientalism.)
To deal with the Other, we can say that the best and most mature approach is empathy – fellow-feeling – as the common trope has it, putting yourself in another’s shoes. But there are far more common strategies: you can demonise the Other, as Hitler did to the Jews; you can ridicule him, categorise him, patronise him: in short, re-define him.
This range of responses is fully on display in Tintin ; perhaps more so than in any other popular entertainment of a like longevity. It’s telling, for instance, that (apart from the Bird brothers in The secret of the Unicorn), every single villain in the 23 albums is a foreigner.
To understand this, we can look at Tintin author Hergé’s life and career, and chart his evolution from rampant xenophobia to the empathy that emerges in his late works.
Georges Rémi—Hergé – was born in 1907 to a lower-middle class couple in Brussels, Belgium. He himself characterised his childhood as being ‘gray’, by which we may understand conventional and boring. He was a fervent Catholic.
Belgium harbors a culture that could pass for a caricature of normalcy and respectability, though not without its dark side. Hergé was comfortable in the most banal backwaters of this culture, never questioning its prejudices (something he looked back on, late in life, with a sort of rueful self-contempt.) He attended a Catholic school, and upon graduating age 18 went to work for a Catholic newspaper, Le Vingtième Siècle.
The brand of Catholicism that embraced him was deeply reactionary, royalist, violently anti-Communist, strongly anti-Capitalist (Moscow and Wall Street being seen as two sides of the same Judeo-Masonic coin ), unthinkingly imperialist. Hey, the Belgian Empire allowed the missionaries to convert all those benighted pagan Blacks.
The Vingtième was edited my a man who would have an immense and lifelong influence on Hergé, Father Norbert Wallez: an enemy of democracy which was seen as hopelessly corrupted by foreigners, Jews and Freemasons, an admirer of Mussolini.
Wallez tasked young Hergé with creating a children’s supplement for the paper, called Le Petit Vingtième. And it was here that Tintin was born.
The first adventure was Tintin au pays des Soviets, a rollicking anti-Communist screed:
Next was the currently notorious Tintin au Congo.
When we think about the European colonial empires we remember those of Britain, France and Spain; in fact, even Denmark and Portugal had their colonies.
Little Belgium was dwarfed by its holdings in the Congo. It was infamous for the reign of atrocity inflicted on the Congolese by king Leopold II. You’d not think so reading young Hergé’s version: his Congo is a little paradise of merry, foolish darkies who love their benevolent Belgian overlords. (In 1946, though, Hergé had to tone down the imperialistic slant in his revision.)
Then came Tintin in America, trotting out more stereotypes: a land of gangsters, greed-crazed businessmen, and tomahawk-toting Indians. (The latter, however, receive sympathy for their ill-treatment at the hands of despoiling Whites.)
Then Cigars of the Pharoah, whizzing through Egypt and India (fakirs, snake-charmers, etc.)
“In reality” said Hergé, “my early works are books by a young Belgian filled with the prejudices and ideas of a Catholic […] they are not very intelligent, I know, and they do me no honor.”
Herge at work
But the next book would show the beginning of Hergé’s move away from mediocre stereotypes.
He had announced the next Tintin adventure would take place in China. A monk with knowledge of the country sent him a young Chinese art student: Chang Chong-Chen.
Chang had a profound influence on Hergé.
Here, for the first time in his life, the cartoonist met the Other he depicted, face-to-face. Chang exhorted Hergé to abandon his clichéd ideas of Chinese people and culture, to research seriously his subject. In return, Hergé put Chang into the strip:
Here, remarkable for its time and context, Tintin and Chang share a good laugh over the stereotypes Europeans bear about the Chinese – stereotypes that would have been typical of Hergé, had Chang not come along:
click image to enlargeThis Shanghai street scene shows a new feel for realism:
click image to enlarge
…but Hergè is not quite able to shake off the snares of cheap exoticism and cliché:
Hergé also seems, at this time, to be moving towards the political center, alarmed by Fascism and Nazism and Belgium’s own Rexism. Le Sceptre d’Ottokar depicts an idyllic Ruritanian-type kingdom threatened by a demagogue named Müsstler (Mussolini + Hitler).
But Belgium plunged into the cataclysm of World War II and German occupation, Le Vingtième Siècle disappeared, and Hergé began running Tintin in the ‘stolen’ collaborationist newspaper Le Soir. A move that would haunt him all his life.
The first Tintin adventure under the occupation was L’Ile Mystérieuse. This is the work that would dog Hergé with accusations of anti-Semitism, and small wonder:
« You heard that, Isaac ? The end of the world !…What if it’s true?”
“Heh! Heh! It vould be good for business, Salomon! I owe 50 000 francs to my zuppliers… zis vay I von’t haff to pay…
That panel appeared only in Le Soir, and was excised from the 1942 album…for reasons of pacing, not of taste. (This was while the Jews of Belgium were being rounded up and sent to the camps by the thousand.)
The plot concerns the race to get to an asteroid that has crashed into the Arctic. On one side is a European expedition, with Tintin & co along for the ride; on the other is the villainous American expedition, with no thought for anything but profit. It is bankrolled by a New York banker named Blumenstein. After the war, he was renamed Bohlwinkel and America became ‘Sao Rico’:
At left, the original, at right the postwar version
Top, nasty Yanks, bottom, nasty Sao Ricans
In 1969, Hergé would write:
“… you are a little too severe with me for this Blumenstein from the year 1940. I admit that I was wrong, but (and I hope that you will believe me) I was far from imagining that the Jewish stories that people told (and still tell today, like stories about people from Marseille, or the Scots […] would lead to such horrors.”
There’s more than a little cluelessness on display here, after Auschwitz. Hergé would always protest that “he didn’t know”, but was lucid enough to add:
“Perhaps I didn’t want to know”.
After the liberation of Belgium, Hergé was roundly reviled for propping up a collaborationist paper, and he was lucky to escape with his neck; as it was, he was banned for two years from any work in the press. It was this enforced idleness, and, no doubt, the need to put distance between him and his ultra-conservative views, that set him on the integral redaction of his albums – shovelling the dirt under the carpet, in the process.
Next: Approaching redemption.
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The entire Tintin in Otherland is here.
The children’s comics album Tintin au Congo, by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé, has been much in the news of late– and not in a good way.
In Britain, the Commission for Racial Equality has condemned the book’s “abominable” racism (and proving once more that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, its sales have jumped 5000% on Amazon UK). It’s been banished from the children’s section in bookshops and libraries across America and the UK, in chains such as Border’s.
Finally, following a lawsuit brought by a Congolese student, Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, a court in Brussels is to determine whether the book should be banned in Belgium. Similar lawsuits have been brought in France and in Britain.
So: just how racist is Tintin au Congo?
“And to say that in Belgium all the li’l Whites are like Tintin!”
“Me find Tintin’s machine…”
“If him no come in 1 year and 1 day it for you…”
“And if you no be good you’ll never be like Tintin!”
“Never again me him see a boula-matari [stone-breaker– the title given to Stanley, the white, conqueror of the Congo] like Tintin”
(Dog) “That Snowy…what a guy!”
Note in the upper left-hand corner: fetish statues of Tintin and Snowy before which a Black man kneels in worship.
I could post many more cringe-worthy excerpts, but why bother?
Yes, Tintin au Congo is racist. Whether it should be restricted or banned is a debate I’ll leave to others, although I certainly wouldn’t allow a child of mine near it.
“So what?” the informed comics reader might object.
It’s no new discovery that throughout comics history racist and bigoted content has permeated the art form. The Imp in Little Nemo:
Connie in Terry and the Pirates:
Ebony in The Spirit:
…the list of offensive stereotypes is endless.
One balances a historical approach with a rejection of such inadmissible values, and one moves on.
But the case of Tintin — and of his creator, Hergé — warrants more thought.
First, unlike the vast majority of popular comics with racist elements, Tintin remains relevant.
The series of 23 albums has sold, to date, over 200 million copies in sixty languages and still sells briskly. It has spun off magazines, toys, television shows, feature films; Stephen Spielberg is now in post-production of a blockbuster adaptation of The secret of the Unicorn. Tintin isn’t enjoyed only by middle-aged fans, either; children respond just as eagerly to his adventures today as they did eighty years ago.
So a certain level of scrutiny is justified, simply because of Tintin’s effect on the culture, and on young minds in particular. Tintin au Congo is the most egregiously racist, but most of the other albums have disturbing aspects as well.
I’m interested in Tintin’s racism, xenophobia, and general fear of the Other for different reasons.
Tintin changed over the years. By which I mean that the individual albums were redrawn, rewritten, compressed and otherwise redacted, some more than once: L’Ile Noire (The Black Island) exists in three versions, from 1938, 1943, and 1965.
And in these redactions, the racism has been drastically toned down. Take this example, from (top) the original, and (bottom) the revised versions of Le Crabe aux Pinces d’Or:
And the above shows why I speak of a toning down of the racism, not of its elimination. The caricature of a brutal black is replaced, true – by the caricature of a brutal Arab.
Note that the above change was not made at Hergé’s initiative: it was his American publisher, Simon and Schuster, who demanded it (as well as the ‘whitewashing’ of four Black characters from Tintin in America. ) As Hergé sardonically remarked,
“What the American editor wanted was the following: No Blacks. Neither good Blacks nor bad Blacks. Because Blacks are neither good nor bad: they don’t exist (as everyone knows, in the USA.)”
Thus a racism of caricature is displaced by a racism of denial.
Indeed, the revised editions function as palimpsests—and as with all palimpsests, the ghost of the original text is sensed. Or shall I make a psychiatric analogy and speak of the return of the repressed? Whichever — I find the tension between the clean images and cleaner morals of the modern editions, and the nasty energy of the originals, gives the strip much of its strange and seductive flavor; something subterranean, something I only intuited until I came face-to-face with the older, rougher, uglier incarnation of the strip.
But the other changes in Tintin over time were rooted in the personal evolution of its creator. He progressed from a narrow-minded petty bourgeois stuffed with the ignorant prejudices of his time and caste, to a far more generous spirit eager to engage the world—and the Other—as it truly is. It took him a mere forty years.
In the next instalment (Update: now posted here), we’ll review the background of Georges Rémi aka Hergé, and the shocks to his world that caused his long climb away from simple bigotry; and in particular his meeting with a young artist from China.
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The entire Tintin in Otherland is here.
All art copyright Studio Hergé/Moulinsart.