TINTIN IN THE CONGO

A Brussels-based Congolese man has for years tried to get Herge’s Tintin in the Congo pulled off the shelves on the grounds that the portrayal of Africans in the book is racist. Bienvenu Mbutu   Mondondo has been unsuccessful in pursuing the Herge foundation Moulinsart, so now he’s started a parallel case against the book’s publisher, Casterman, reported edmontonjournal.com. The plaintiff demands that the book be withdrawn from sale—or, failing that, that a warning be inserted in the book to alert readers that the portrait of Africans is not accurate. A spokesman for Casterman said: “Casterman opposes such a withdrawal. This work was created 80 years ago, it is just a snapshot of the sentiments of the day. It is distributed in Europe and Africa without problem," she added. Tintin in the Congo first appeared in Belgian newspaper Le Vingtieme Siecle as a comic strip in 1930-1931; Herge was only 23 at the time, and he’d never been to Africa. “Before his death in 1983,” reports CBC News, “he admitted that he regretted the negative stereotypes and attitudes in the book and in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets.” Leo Cendrowicz, Time magazine's Brussels correspondent, said on CBC's current affairs show, “Q,” that he expects the case will be dismissed if for no other reason than lack of financial prowess: Mondondo is an unemployed student living in Brussels and is up against a publishing house with huge resources. But Cendrowicz added that the case could set a new precedent for litigation against classics written in the past. "That is the fear of publishers, that it will open the floodgates for … literature that is more than 50 years old. Everything written in the past was based on the morality and ethics of the past," he said. "We can't assume the authors of the past had the same political correctness we have today."