France/Congo - Tintin

Congo man seeks Tintin book ban

Article published on the 2009-09-02 Latest update 2009-09-02 14:58 TU

Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo with the offending volume.
(Photo: AFP)

A Congolese accountant is looking to bring a racism lawsuit in France against the comic hero Tintin. He claims the Belgian artist Hergé’s controversial Tintin in the Congo is propaganda for colonialism and amounts to "racism and xenophobia".

The case was originally brought to Belgium courts two years ago for symbolic damages of just a euro from Tintin's Belgian publishers Moulinsart, and demanded the book be withdrawn from the market, but with little result.

Now with the lawsuit in France the plaintiff, Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, is hoping for better results. He accused judges in the comic hero's native Belgium of trying to bury his case to protect a "national symbol", British press reported.

"Tintin's little (black) helper is seen as stupid and without qualities. It makes people think that blacks have not evolved," he was quoted as saying.

Following his Belgium disappointment, Mondondo’s lawyer, Claude Ndjakanyi, is launching parallel proceedings in France. He said he would go "all the way to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary".

In 2007, British race watchdogs pulled the book from children's shelves and attacked the Tintin cartoons for making black Africans "look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles".

The Congo remained a Belgian colony until 1960 and between 1885 and 1908 millions of Congolese are thought to have died under the brutal rule of Belgium's King Leopold II.

Georges Remi, the Tintin cartoonist who worked under the Hergé pen-name, reworked the book in 1946 to remove references to Congo as Belgian colony. It still contains images such as a black woman bowing to Tintin and saying: "White man very great. White mister is big juju man!"

Publishers Moulinsart argue the row is “silly" and that book must be seen in its historical context.