Tintin au Congo

(Jrt)

Tintin au Congo
Tintin au Congo (The Adventures of Tintin see "Little Twentieth" in Congo, Herge, 1931) is the second album cartoon Adventures of Tintin, published in black and white from 1930 to 1931 in the pages of "Little Twentieth" , Supplement to the journal The Twentieth Century. The color and the current album is published in 1946.

Synopsis
The story takes place during the colonial era. As part of his work as a journalist, Tintin, accompanied by his dog Snowy, cruise ship visits to Congo, the great Belgian colony at the time. Tom, a man smuggled on board the same boat, will try several times to kill him once they arrived safely.

The following reveals key moments of intrigue.

A series of adventures leads Tintin Babaoro'm of the kingdom, where he became the sorcerer attitré. He found that white men who want his death (including Tom) are gangsters affiliated with Al Capone, who wants to control the production of diamonds in Congo.

Characters

* Tintin
* Milou
* Tom: Appears on page 5. It is sent by Gibbons to remove Tintin. It is the "evil" of the album, but will never be able to carry out its mission. It is eaten by crocodiles on page 48.

* Jack: Appears on page 11. It guides during his Tintin adventure and it saves lives.

* The king of Babaoro'm: Appears on page 21. He asked Tintin going to hunt lions.

* Muganga: Appears on page 24. It is the sorcerer of Babaoro'm. He becomes jealous of Tintin. With Tom, he will try to get rid of the reporter. He is a member of the Brotherhood of Aniotas.

* The missionary: Appears on page 34. It saves Tintin crocodiles.

* Jimmy Mac Duff: Appears on page 38. It is a supplier of animals for zoos in Europe.

* Gibbons: Appears on page 51. It is the boss Tom. He received by Scarface Al Capone order to kill Tintin. Do not be confused with another character named Gibbons that will appear in The Blue Lotus.

Analysis
Towards 1930, the Congo was a real Eldorado for Belgium. The Congo, eighty times larger than the countries that colonisait, had a basement extremely rich. At that time, the territory lacked manpower. The trend of the time was to advertise for this country.

The release of the album began on June 5, 1930 in Le Petit Vingtième and ended June 11, 1931. The album was first published by Editions du Petit Twentieth then it was taken a little later editions Casterman which s'assurèrent publication of Adventures of Tintin in exclusivity.

For resumption of the album in 1946, Hergé redessina adventure. He put in color, reduced from 115 boards to 62 pages and changed the colonialist ideology of the album. Thus, the geography and history lesson that gave Tintin "Your homeland, Belgium" found himself replaced by a math lesson. Hergé redessina also almost all the images, affina sets, redonna the clarity cut and changed the dialogues to make them more alive.

Hergé said later that during the creation of Tintin au Congo, as for Tintin in the land of the Soviets, he lived in an environment full of prejudice. It is the peculiarity of Tintin au Congo: the album, far from the positions taken by anti-colonialist who appear in the work of Herge from the Blue Lotus, is filled with stereotypes typical of the vision that Africa had the Europeans at that time.

Herge and declare about the album:

"For the Congo as in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, it is that I was fed prejudices of the environment in which I lived… was in 1930. I did not know this country that what people told at the time: "The Negroes are big children, fortunately we're here!" And so on. And I've drawn, these Africans, according to these criteria then, in the pure paternalistic spirit which was the time in Belgium.

Aware of these stereotypes that are actually the basis of certain convictions of this work for racist content, Hergé however defended his work by saying that his characters were black fantasy, and cited in this sense a laudatory article published by the magazine in Zaire 1969, that "if some images caricatures of the Congolese people by Tintin in the Congo are white smile, they laugh frankly Congolese, because the Congolese people will find reasons to mock the white man who saw them as"

In 2007, controversy linked to these stereotypes becomes valid after a notice of the British Commission for Racial Equality (British Commission on Racial Equality) who finds the cartoon "racist" and asks to withdraw bookstores. The bookseller Borders then decided not to sell the album "The radius child," moving towards "adult comics". Shortly thereafter, a Congolese student at the Free University of Brussels filed complaints of racism and demand that the album be withdrawn from commerce.

Anecdotes

* In the original version as published in the "Little twentieth", the return of Tintin in the plane led to fraternize with two méharistes in the Sahara, as the plane above the Spain y disrupted a bullfight.
* Tintin is interrupted by a leopard while he gives a lesson in arithmetic. In the original version (included in the Archives Hergé), the blackboard is actually a map of geography, and Tintin said: "Today I will tell you about your fatherland: Belgium".
* If, in this album, the Congolese speak in a rough syntax, elephants and monkeys, they speak among themselves in excellent french.
* Tintin in this album shows a certain cruelty to animals, unlike the following albums: it gives kicks in a leopard weakened, it detonated a rhinoceros, and it kills dépèce a monkey to go recover Milou who was abducted.
* In the current version of the album, Dupondt make a brief appearance in the first case when they are absent from the original version, in the same case, on each side of Tintin, as seen Quick and Flupke but also Hergé which was represented alongside his friends Edgar Pierre Jacobs and Jacques Van Melkebeke.
* In this adventure, Tintin detonated a rhinoceros by drilling a hole that fills dynamite. The Swedish publisher did not appreciate this way and earned his amendment. In the new page redesigned for export, rhinoceros fled after the shooting that takes Tintin accidentally. However, in the French version, the original scene has been preserved.
* Tintin is called twice "Boula-Matari" (p. 28 and last page). Boula-Matari which means "rock breaker" was the nickname given by the natives as a sign of deference and respect for the English explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley.

Return of Tintin in the Congo in 1970
Tintin in the Congo will return in 1970 in the short animated film advertising Tintin and the SGM (General Minerals Corporation Belgian). A paperback adapted from the film is edited in the same year by Publiart (Guy Decissy) / Casterman.

Read also Tintin in the Land of the Soviets

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