Tintin in the Congo
Review
Tintin in the Congo, by , is the second book in the The Adventures of Tintin. In it, Tintin travels to the Belgian Congo and uncovers a diamond-smuggling ring.
I read Tintin as a kid but never got a chance to read Tintin in the Congo—it hadn’t been published in America. When I started reading the series to my kids—starting with Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon—I realized I could finally track down the controversial book now that the internet exists. And no, I’m not going to read this one to my kids.
The book was first written in 1930, and rewrote and redrew it in 1946, taking the opportunity to sanitize it a bit by removing the more overt colonial elements. Even so, the revised version is still incredibly racist. The Congolese are drawn in blackface, portrayed as lazy, easily fooled, and supercilious.
The story is simple—just Tintin getting into trouble after trouble—and only develops an overarching plot at the very end. It’s a far cry from the more complex stories in the later books. Since the only characters are Tintin and Snowy, they talk to each other a lot more, although it’s not clear Tintin actually understands his dog. Snowy takes on most of the slapstick, a role later filled by Haddock, Calculus, and Thomson and Thompson.
The “rules” of the world aren’t fully settled yet, either, and things are a lot crazier than in the later books. At one point, Tintin shoots a monkey and wears its skin as a disguise. In another, he makes a slingshot out of rubber trees and uses it to knock out an African buffalo. It feels like a Looney Tunes cartoon rather than the semi-realistic adventure series it eventually becomes.
It’s interesting to read something so clearly out of its time, but it’s not good. Hopefully, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, another book that wasn’t published in America when I was little, turns out better.