The accusation has long bedevilled the first albums of the adventures of the popular Belgian comic book character. Tintin in the Congo , with its patronizing portrayal of Africans, has long been cited as an example of outdated views on race. But it is now the third volume in the series, Tintin in America , that has made the news, after complaints in Winnipeg led to its temporary removal from a Chapters bookstore.
Following the uproar last weekend, the Winnipeg Public Library said it was also reviewing whether to keep Tintin in America in its collections and reorder it. Tintin in Congo was already pulled from main circulation in and not reordered. After Tintin discovers an oil gusher, businessman show up and bid thousands of dollars for the exploitation rights. The next panel shows the natives being expelled at gunpoint.
My favorite in those days was Tintin in Tibet , a comic whose final frame still makes me emotional. Over the years, my favorites changed, as did the things I saw in them. But what continues to appeal to me most about Tintin is what attracted me to the series in the first place, the common thread that runs through all the albums: friendship, loyalty, adventure, and, to use a word seldom used anymore, honor.
With age, I could add one more thing: familiarity. Still, idols rarely age well. His work on a wartime newspaper allied with the Nazis is well documented, as is the fact that some of his earliest Tintin books disseminated far-right ideas to children. Neither comic was available in English until decades later, and it was then that I read them with a mixture of horror, amusement, and embarrassment. In one frame in Congo, an African tribe worships Tintin. Him give half hat to each one.
Him very good white. What those comics taught me was that heroes, even boyish, never-aging ones like Tintin, are deeply flawed, and if you ruminate on something long enough, even a cherished childhood memory, you will inevitably see those flaws clearly.
There were things that I loved about Tintin that made it easier to reject those things I did not—without ignoring them altogether. What kind of message does that send to children? What kind of message does it send to those depicted? And if these "educational examples" are so important, why does it appear as if the same white people who are advocating for them have learnt nothing from them?
I've seen, for instance, Prisoners of the Sun being referred to as a shining example of Tintin's anti-racism. And yet it portrays Andean Quechua people as incredibly superstitious and practicing human sacrifice, with only the fully westernised Quechua boy Zorrino shown in a positive light. The native people not siding with the whites are made out as evil, completely ignoring the horrors of colonial crimes.
And of course Tintin is the white man to the rescue… And these people are supposed to have learnt something from being critical to racist literature? Honestly, it's as if Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom were to be considered a fair representative of Hindu culture. It's also problematic that we need to continually review and respond to the books that are obviously racist.
I'm more interested in the works that are in between, the ones that can be kept, and the question of how we can guarantee that there will actually be a critical discussion around them. I really don't think it's so strange to take something like Tintin away from children.
We are perfectly ready to make this sort of appraisal when it comes to gender roles, or sexuality, or the negative stereotyping of poor people in very old books, but I think the problem here is that it's seen as a group concern, something internal to Afro-Swedish people. The wider implications around children's rights not to have their group depicted as a racist stereotype are missed.
And honestly I don't know which white parents would want their children exposed to racist imagery anyway! In the Anglo-Saxon and Francophone world the discussion around Tintin's colonial heritage has been ongoing for a lot longer, with Tintin in the Congo for instance not published in English until the 90s because of concerns about its stereotypical, racist depictions. How is Sweden different here?
Sweden's national identity is interesting. We've got this view of our country as being fundamentally anti-racist at a deep level. This has almost become the big official Swedish ideology. And yet our anti-racism is different from that of the UK, France or the United States because their anti-racism has been framed against a backdrop of an awareness of the crimes of colonialism, and as a response to them. Sweden has a colonial history as well. It participated in the slave trade and was the last of the Western European countries to abolish slavery.
Yet people here know almost nothing about it! It's just a note in history textbooks, and there are almost no efforts to commemorate the victims. Up until the Second World War, Sweden was a pioneer state when it came to eugenics and scientific racism , and continuing a programme of forced sterilizations way after.
I had a discussion with my uncle — Sierra Leonean like my father but living in the Netherlands — and he was shocked to learn that the left-leaning social democratic country he held as an ideal was actually sterilizing citizens as recently as in the seventies. I had to correct him, "Harold, Sweden is actually still sterilizing transsexual people in this very day and age …".
Now, I'm not saying there isn't some good reason for this. For instance, the Swedish state secretly and illegaly supported the ANC of South Africa economically when no other western countries did — when there seemed to be little hope for Apartheid ever ending. Sweden helped refugees flee Chile after Pinochet's coup there. And at times we've had the most liberal asylum laws in Europe. Many Vietnam War draft dodgers came here, and Sweden was perhaps together with Canada one of the few western countries where criticism of the Vietnam War moved from the fringes of the debate to its mainstream.
But what actually changed on the ground is a different matter.
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