Tintin : An Inspiration

 

I’m a huge fan of The Tintin Series and have read every single comic and now own it in soft copy form as well J (for requests …email me). I was introduced to Tintin at a very young age probably when I was in the 4^th or 5^th Standard, and at that time I was a miserable loner who had a bronchitis condition a result of which I could not play much and thus had literally no friends. Thus what was a lonely boy to do after school hours cooped up in his house and mind you we are talking here bout the year 1993 to 1995, when television meant Doordarshan and Internet was unheard of, India was just taking baby steps into an era of Economic Liberalization and as such the knowledge about other cultures and countries was hard to come across, not that I specifically wanted any.

 

In any case once when I had gone to Kerala for my yearly visits to my mom’s house, my aunt there gave me a copy of Tintin in America, as I was an avid reader and as such an oddity at my age when normally kids want to go out and play and stuff. Anyways I got reading and by the time I finished it I was hooked!!!! Initially I didn’t understand why I was so attracted to it and quite frankly at that age I didn’t really care but now that I look back I understand … I understand that the reason I loved them was cause each book was like a window into another culture, another land although the depiction might not have been 100% accurate yet at that time for my kiddish brain it was Manna from Heaven. And this is absolutely true, for Tintin’s creator Hergè’s style broadly speaking was to pick plotlines from reported news from around the world, hence essentially every story would be basically set in one country and the reader would by the end of the story have a very rough picture of what that country and its people would be like.

However the purpose of this post is not to showcase my love and loyalty towards the Comic series but to highlight another issue that has recently been revived. A Belgium citizen has very recently objected to Hergè’s depiction of Africans in Tintin in Congo. Although I am and always have been an huge supporter of the anti racist movement, and to that side of my psyche Hergè’s work in Tintin in Congo screams of blatant Racism, yet at the same time it is difficult for me to bear this huge slur on my (pseudo)hero.

 

 
I believe that though the depiction of Africans in that particular story is offending yet we MUST consider the fact that this is one of the initial works of Hergè’s (the second actually after Tintin: Land of the Soviets), probably conceived in the 1920’s, and in that era Racism was rampant in society and an accepted part of life in most of Europe and America, although this does not make it OK to do what he did yet Hergè’s depiction of Africans as dumb albeit loyal people is probably one of the mildest of the depictions that was accorded on Africans during that era. In fact it is a well known fact that in society Africans were looked down upon, considered inferior and very relegated to the level of slaves, Hergè could’ve depicted that in toto, he could even have depicted them as cannibals and uncivilized people (quite like Spielberg’s depiction of Indians as a cannibalistic, idol worshipping, mindless bunch of people in one of his Indiana Jones movies which by the way came out decades later) yet he didn’t and infact in a later book titled Tintin and the Red Sea Sharks, Tintin actually rescues Africans from being sold as slaves(or at least attempts to….).

 

In any case the point I would like to make is this… Tintin has an image in the hearts and minds of Millions of people all over the globe, partly attributable to the fact that the Comics itself were sold in over Fifty Languages, and that love and loyalty will not dwindle on account of this recent case filed in the Belgian Courts. I have and always will be a PROUD Tintin Fan.

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