A Congolese man is dragging Tintin before the courts, accusing the quiffed Belgian cartoon hero of racism and colonialist propaganda. Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo wants Tintin in the Congo, a comic strip chartering the boy reporter's adventures in Africa, to be pulled from the shelves in Belgium. “The blacks are portrayed as stupid children who can't add up two and two and who have to kneel before the whites,” said Mondondo, who lives in Belgium. “Such books should no longer be on sale in the twenty-first century.” The book, drawn in 1931, shows Tintin sporting a pith helmet over his trademark blond quiff and decked out in colonial khaki as he ventures forth among native Africans. In one scene, he teaches Congolese schoolchildren; in another, a black woman bows before him in honour of the “great” white man, the “big juju man”. Tintin's creator, Hergé, later described this early adventure as a “mistake from my youth”, and said it had been the product of his bourgeois upbringing. He went on to purge it of all references of “Belgian Congo” and of its overt depictions of colonial rule when he re-drew it for a colour edition in the 1940s. He also removed a sequence in which Tintin used dynamite to blow up an elephant. The student has vowed to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary. And he has also written a letter to the current king, Albert II, to bring the cartoon in question to the monarch's attention. A verdict in the case is expected May 5.
