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.

All Tintin art and images copyright Moulinsart

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.

All Tintin art copyright Moulinsart

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The entire Tintin in Otherland series is here.