I was strolling through the Brussels flea market, and I thought of Tintin. Didn’t he buy one of those boats on the same market The Secret of the Unicorn† I thought back to the Tintins of my childhood. At my grandmother’s house there was a whole pile. I had only just finished reading and the meaning of phrases such as ‘What a conviction in the slightest extra’ or ‘We will go unnoticed among the crew’ largely passed me by. I also didn’t know words like ‘sapristi’ or ‘bashi-boezit’, let alone ‘Anakoloeten! Invertebrates! Piece of ectoplasm! Triple won over alpine crop bearers!’ I liked the pictures, though.
Only later, in biology class, did I learn what an ‘invertebrate’ was, only when I started studying Dutch did I find out what an ‘anakolute’ was, I first read about ‘ectoplasm’ about twenty years ago (in a piece about paranormal phenomena in the 19th century) and those ‘alpine crop bearers’ were revealed to me yesterday, when I bought a book in a Brussels comic shop with all the curses of Captain Haddock in it. In French, in which those alpine crop bearers are called ‘crétins des Alpes’, which actually sounds less funny.
It’s a nice little book, though, with pictures of Haddock, for example, chasing a condor (Tintin and Zorrino in his wake) and shouting: ‘Pirate! doryphore! Moule a Gaufres! Attends que je te déplume, espèce de chouette mal empaillée!’ (That ‘attends que je te déplume’ is actually very funny there.)
I also bought Tintin in Africafirstly because I remembered it being my favorite fifty years ago, secondly because it has long been notorious for its mischievous colonial character. I leafed. And yes, Tintin in Africa is indeed incredibly wrong. The black population of Congo (at the time a Belgian colony) is portrayed as stupid, cowardly, lazy, vain, superstitious, cruel and/or slavish and everyone talks nonsense with thick lips.
That kind of racism was common about a century ago, because people didn’t know any better, not even Hergé, who considered himself a humanist. I was amazed at Tintin’s extraordinary cruelty to animals. Bobbie is held hostage by a monkey and Tintin must rescue him. How does he do that? He shoots another, innocent monkey. Tintin, cheerful next to the dead monkey: ‘Fine! And now we strip off his fur!’ Tintin dons the monkey’s skin and remarks snidely: ‘It’s not a tailor-made suit, of course, but alla! It can go on!’
I could not believe my eyes. It seemed Silence of the Lambs well. And it all gets much worse: Tintin brutally assaults a leopard, he shoots an elephant and takes his tusks with him, he cuts open a live python (again to save Bobbie, but still); lions, buffaloes, antelopes, they all die. Except a rhinoceros. He comes out with a fright.
Suddenly I remembered the same album from back in the day. The rhinoceros does not live there, oh no, he is blown up by Tintin with a stick of dynamite, ‘boum!’, completely to shreds. I looked it up, and it turned out to be true. In 1975 Hergé edited the page with that rhinoceros into a ‘more animal-friendly’ version, I read. Very understandable. But it is strange that all that other hunting and torture did not stop there. And all those racist situations, why have they not been purified? Probably because there would have been almost nothing left of that album.
The question remains: why the hell did I like this fifty years ago? I’d have to show the album to a modern day toddler to find out.
But I dare not.