Eurocentrism – the Graphic Novel

Following complaints by human-rights lawyer David Enright about the content of an 'unabridged' version of Hergé's Tintin in the Congo in a Borders bookshop's children's section in the UK, Borders has agreed to move the book to the adult graphic novels section. The controversy has since spread to the US and South Africa.

The (UK) Commission for Racial Equality, CRE, stated on 12 July 2007 that the "book contains imagery and words of hideous racial prejudice, where the 'savage natives' look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles … Whichever way you look at it, the content of this book is blatantly racist … The only place that it might be acceptable for this to be displayed would be in a museum, with a big sign saying 'old fashioned, racist claptrap'." It is unacceptable, they suggest, for any shop to sell this book.

Tintin au Congo was written in 1931. By a Belgian. Now Belgium doesn't have a particularly good record as a colonial power in Africa. The Belgian king, Leopold II, turned the region into a vast personal empire and the human rights abuses were possibly the worst recorded for colonial Africa. Belgium took Leopold's 'playground' away from him in 1908 (a year after Georges Remi, aka Hergé, was born) after considerable international condemnation. They then ran the country as the Belgian Congo until independence was achieved in 1960.

The original version of Tintin au Congo was revised in 1946, Remi removed references to the country being a Belgian colony, but the racist representation of Africans was retained. An English version of the book was unavailable for decades, a black and white edition appeared first in 1991, and a color version was published in 2005 with a restrictive ribbon which described the book as being a "Collector's Edition." A brief forward by the translators further explains that Hergé's "bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes" may be "an interpretation that some of today's readers … find offensive." They also point out that the book's treatment of big-game hunting is also offensive to modern morals.

The real point is that Tintin in the Congo is a book of its time – Eurocentric views of Africa were rife. Remi became much more enlightened later in life, and is quoted as saying "...I am not trying to excuse myself. I admit that my early books were typical of the Belgian bourgeois mentality of the time."

Is it right to demand that these historical Eurocentric views be brushed under the carpet? Made available only to the most perseverant of academics and enthusiasts? Or should we instead be holding this book up to our next generation and saying "This is how people in Europe thought of Africans during the colonial era. We have learnt from our mistakes and are trying to create a better world."

We shouldn't be whitewashing Eurocentrism.

^{Image: © Alistair Boddy-Evans. Licensed to About.com, Inc.}