Tintin in the Congo

Tintin in the Congo is the second volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle for its children's supplement Le Petit Vingtième, it was serialised weekly from May 1930 to June 1931 before being published in a collected volume by Éditions de Petit Vingtième in 1931

In the late 20th century, Tintin in the Congo became increasingly controversial for both its perceived racist colonial attitude toward Congolese people and for its glorification of big-game hunting. Accordingly, attempts were made in Belgium, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States to either ban the work or restrict its availability to children. Critical reception of the work has been largely negative, with commentators on The Adventures of Tintin describing it as one of Hergé's lesser works.

Controversy

On Tintin's journey to the Congo shows a page after page of graphic representations of black African people as sub-human monkey people, bowing before a white teenager, worshipping his dog as a god and incapable of proper speech. In fact, the only black monkey caricature in the book who could speak English properly was a chimpanzee. Tintin and his traveling partner don't mistreat the natives. They find their attempts to build a country adorable, like a chimp that's learned to eat with a knife and fork.

In the comic -- which was published 30 years after Joseph Conrad published Heart of Darkness -- the Congolese people practically drop to their knees and begin worshiping their honky masters, thankful for their presence in the Congo.

Unfortunately, this was a pretty accurate depiction of how Belgian people viewed their role in the Congo, which they began developing with a "humanitarian assembly" called the African International Association, one of the rare humanitarian assemblies now studied by something called genocide scholars.