Tintin In The Congo – Hergé, 1930-31 [Revised 1946] ½★

Hergé Lays an Egg

Racism stinks. So does killing animals for sport. Having gotten these points out of the way, I’d like to go on and say my main beef with Tintin In The Congo has nothing to do with either. It’s more a matter of quality.

Though not the first published Tintin adventure, Tintin In The Congo was the earliest converted into the color-album format we know the Tintin series by today. Author Hergé reportedly shaped its 62 pages from a much larger whole. According to tintin.wikia.com, 110 pages were published between June 1930 and June 1931 for young readers of a Belgian newspaper supplement, Le Petit Vingtième. Editing something down to half its size can’t help but affect quality, no?

Yet other early Tintin stories got the same treatment; none show the same scars. Even Tintin In America, a hodgepodge of random episodes in many ways, has a storyline, a sense of narrative progression from page to page. With Tintin In The Congo, one senses an overworked Hergé throwing together random ideas cobbled from National Geographic over the course of endless deadline days to appease an audience of diversion-starved, inattentive kiddies. None of the warmth or magic of later Tintin is in evidence, the flow of gentle humor, the sudden thrill of the chase. It’s too static.

Young reporter Tintin sets off for the Congo, then a Belgian colony. En route by ocean liner, his dog Snowy uncovers and tangles with a stowaway. Upon arrival, the famed reporter gets a hero’s welcome and settles in for big-game hunting. While hunting, Tintin encounters the Babaorum tribe. The tribe’s juju man comes to resent Tintin for his habit of fixing problems and curing the sick, and plots with the stowaway to kill him. But with the help of a Congolese friend, Coco, Tintin manages to escape and expose the juju man to his tribe…

That only gets us halfway through Tintin In The Congo, but that’s quite enough. You might sense from my rough synopsis how things just sort of happen in it. The stowaway we meet on the ship just happens to appear in the Congolese village presumably miles inland, bent on revenge. After fixing a train, Tintin is adopted as leader by a village and resented by their juju man. For no clear reason, Coco keeps popping up as Tintin’s ally in just the right spot.

Perhaps connections were made clearer in the original, 110-page book published in 1931. It’s hard to say. Why care if the author didn’t?

Tintin In The Congo starts okay. After a very abrupt first panel shows Tintin boarding a train and bidding adieu to his companions (one a self-portrait of Hergé), the story settles into an amusing standoff between Snowy and a surly parrot whose squawks of “Abandon Ship!” scare the pooch. Snowy eventually chases the parrot down a ship funnel, dropping atop our only real villain, the stowaway. For whatever reason, perhaps not wanting the dog’s barking to give away his hiding place, the stowaway (later identified as “Tom”) tosses Snowy from a porthole into the sea. Spotting his dog in the waves, Tintin leaps overboard to save him, having a close shave with a shark in the process.

“Oh, Snowy, my friend, you’ve come back…” Tintin exclaims after some attention from a ship doctor. “Now, a quick change of clothes, then we’ll take a well-earned rest.”

It’s not a terrific first eight pages, but at least it’s a start. Tintin’s relationship with Snowy is pleasantly established, you get comedy from the parrot and adventure from the stowaway and shark. There’s even a callout to recurring detectives Thompson and Thomson, who appear in the first panel of the 1946 color book looking on with interest at someone they haven’t yet met at this point in the series.

The first panel of Tintin In The Congo, as it appeared in 1931 (black and white) and 1946 (color). In addition to adding himself and the Thompson twins to the color version, Hergé also included the book's colorist, Edgar P. Jacobs. Image from Wikipedia.

My inner eight-year-old was purring as boy and dog took their ease on deck in the sun. After that, the book settles into a rut from which it never returns.

If there is a running theme to Tintin In The Congo, it is that our protagonist is a pretty big deal with the natives. When Tintin’s liner pulls into the dock, black people bearing shields and spears welcome him profusely. A sign is held aloft: “LONG LIVE TINTIN AND SNOWY.” Meanwhile, the strange stowaway, who to this point has only interacted with Snowy, and only to the point of tossing the dog overboard, skulks behind some ship crates, plotting…

“Patience! He who laughs last, laughs longest!”

Was there a missing page or two, where the stowaway was foiled somehow by Tintin and thus had cause for resentment? Later on, Hergé gives us a motive, but it doesn’t connect to any of the action in the book. Al Capone plots to steal African diamonds, and to keep reporter Tintin from uncovering his scheme, directs Tom to kill him.

If Tintin was portrayed as investigating the diamond trade, maybe this would work. But for all his time in the Congo, we never see him do any actual reporting. He never so much as picks up a pen or phone. All we see him do, for pages and pages, is hunt animals.

This forms the less impassioned – but more substantive – criticism by the woke police who have forced the banning of Tintin In The Congo from stores and libraries. It is indeed hard to enjoy the sight of Tintin shooting at an elephant and, a few panels later, pleasantly greeting a priest while toting the animal’s tusks over his shoulder.

Not all of Tintin’s violence against animals is so wanton. There is a crocodile attack which Tintin responds to by sticking his emptied rifle into the creature’s gaping maw. But the repetitive nature of the violence, its lack of purpose, and its sometimes bizarre sense of humor makes it hard to take – whether or not you are a vegan.

The croc attack: In addition to story flaws, it is noted that this, the only depiction in the series of Tintin in sub-Saharan Africa, takes little advantage of the tropical setting, making for a flat, drab landscape. Image from https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/karadamodernimperialism/?page_id=74.

The strangest episode for me involves a monkey (or perhaps a gorilla; the art is not on point) kidnapping Snowy. To retrieve his dog, Tintin shoots dead another monkey standing harmlessly a few feet away, then skins the animal and climbs into its carcass:

“This costume certainly isn’t made to measure…Never mind. It’ll do.”

I can think of other solutions without resorting to killing a similar animal and wearing its skin. For one thing, how would that have smelled on a warm afternoon in the jungle? No matter; Tintin’s ploy works well enough so that Snowy is soon free.

The racism charge against Tintin In The Congo is where most modern animosity for the book lies; it’s certainly jolting to see local tribesmen depicted as wide-eyed innocents so flattered by Tintin’s attentions that they bow and scrape before him. By book’s end, with Tintin and Snowy heading back to Europe, one black tribesman is even shown kneeling before a carved idol of the boy and his dog.

Calling this “racism” feels right but misses the mark. Black characters here are not portrayed in a way that renders them unlikable, villainous, or somehow inferior to their European counterparts, the way white Americans are in Tintin In America, or Japanese in The Blue Lotus. The Congolese are morally decent in the main; even the juju man comes around after Tintin saves him from a boa constrictor.

What causes people to balk about Tintin In The Congo is its unapologetic colonialism. This was something Hergé copped to in later years by way of expressing disappointment with how Congo turned out. It’s the reason for all the bowing and scraping: Tintin is not depicted as a superior being so much as a bringer of needed civilization to a dark continent. Whether or not you think that civilization actually was needed (for a time, the Belgian Congo was one of the most cruelly-managed colonies of all) depends on your perspective, i. e. then and now.

One panel Hergé completely redid from the 1946 edition showed Tintin in a Congo classroom, teaching students about “your country,” Belgium: He changed it to a mathematics lesson instead.

Without having read the original, I can’t say this idea seems objectionable. The Congo was a Belgian colony in 1931 (and still was in 1946); why not tell youngsters about this distant place they were connected to? Perhaps Tintin’s lecture was too triumphalist for comfort, not to mention by 1946 the Belgians had a better appreciation how being occupied wasn’t so fun. The Congo would finally become its own country in 1960.

Tintin heals a native with a dose of quinine. Hergé later said one reason for locating the adventure in the Belgian Congo was to inspire Belgians to serve in the colony as doctors or priests. Image from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1557233/Ban-racist-Tintin-book-says-CRE.html.

Occasionally a panel will show a Congolese character acting foolish or lazy; one panel depicts a local train completely falling apart after colliding into Tintin’s car. Train attendants are dressed in silly military uniforms in apparent imitation of European officers, and are wholly inept. This broad comedy wouldn’t bother us if not for the skin color.

The closest Tintin In The Congo comes to racist sentiment involves Coco, the young boy who becomes Tintin’s loyal companion through the first half of the adventure. After helping Tintin defeat the juju man, Coco disappears from the story completely and without explanation, never to be referred to again.

In a better book making this a case against would be stronger: Clearly Hergé had judged Coco inferior somehow and unworthy of further interest. But Tintin In The Congo’s ineptitude provides an obvious out: Hergé just didn’t care enough to account for secondary characters or their fates once they finished performing as plot devices.

That really is where the book fails for me: I can’t even read it for insight into Tintin’s origins since it departs so from the formula. Tintin In The Congo is naïve without being innocent, simple-minded without being simple, weird without being fun. An anomaly, and so very dull at that.