Tintin and Leopold in Congo

I am ashamed to admit that I only started reading the main francophone Belgian newspaper, Le Soir last week - and only due to the fact that it was available free in Exki, a common chain of lunch take-away food near the Commission. The Commission sandwiches are less appetizing after a while, and I haven't had much time for proper lunches lately due to trainings, choral concerts and actual work.

The main topic in paper of last week's Thursday was the possible lawsuit against the publisher of Tintin, a.k.a the national symbol of Belgium. Bienvenu Mbutu Mdondondo, a Congolese student in Belgium accuses the album "Tintin in Congo" (known in Finnish as "Tintti Afrikassa") of racism and wants it to be transferred from bookshops to museum displays. He pressed charges in Belgium in 2007 - still pending - and in France in 2009 (Figaro article on the issue in French). Mdondondo has proclaimed to be ready to go to the European Court of Human Rights, if needed.

Previously Tintin in Congo has already been moved out from children's section to adult graphic novels in bookshop shelves in the UK (article by the Guardian), and placed in the special collection only accessible by appointment in the Brooklyn Public Library.

Young Hergé has transmitted the patronizing colonialist view perfectly in this second Tintin comic book, but looking at it now feels as astonishing as when reading old geography books or guidance books for missionaries going to the field. Tintin in Congo portrays Africans as child-like, naive, big-lipped creatures who speak French badly (worse than the dog Milou, or Snowy in English, it is poignantly noted) and in need to be "civilised".

The photos in this post are from EuropeAid's trainees' visit to the Africa Museum in Tervuren, 14 kilometres from Brussels. A huge building next to a forest has excellent temporary exhibitions (now one more anthropological about an ethnic group from Southern Ethiopia, the Omo people, and another mixing tradition and modernity, "Persona" with dozens of masks and modern African art), a pretty good permanent exhibition with artifacts mostly from Central Africa. There is also a dead zoo section with stuffed animals and plants, and on top of it all a historical section.

I was particularly keen to see how Belgians are dealing with their somewhat ugly past in Congo. Based on the historical narrative presented in the exhibition the answer is: they are not. The texts in the exhibition stated that "some abuses took place in the early 20th century" - a mild understatement considering that millions of Congolese died during Leopold II's rule, although the exact number is hard to measure in the absence of reliable statistics.

Yet, in the exhibition the colonizers and generals are pretty much treated as heroes who sacrificed their lives to the "economic and social improvement of Congo" (the text in the statue picture). That is not the way in which the history of colonialism should be presented in the 21st century.

In fact everything in Brussels seems to be named after King Leopold II. He has a park next to the European Parliament - the whole EU quartier is called "quartier Leopold", thus having loads of hotels and apartment blocks named after Leopold. The end stop of the main circular metro line is also "Leopold II". Many of the most opulent buildings in Brussels have been built with the money Leopold managed to extract from Congo, and the wealth of the country was largely built on that same blood money.

To an outsider it seems that Belgium has some un-dealt issues with its past. Perhaps this Tintin episode will give a chance to delve deeper into the colonial past, and to teach the new Belgian generation something about the ways in which Europeans treated non-Europeans. Including a note about the racist attitudes and the historical context in which Tintin in Congo was created could be in place in Belgium as well - in the UK it was added as a foreword already in 2005. Changing the past might be impossible, but changing our attitudes should not be.