KEY POINTS:
The silliest aspect of the furore surrounding the second adventure of the comic-book character Tintin is that it should have erupted now. The bookstore chain Borders removed copies of Tintin in the Congo from the children's section of its British stores after the Commission for Racial Equality complained that it contained "imagery and words of hideous racial prejudice, where the 'savage natives' look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles". Borders stores around the world quickly followed suit. The local stores averred they were "committed to acting ... with sensitivity to all of the communities we serve."
The problem is that it's all a bit late. The book was published in 1931 and its Belgian author Georges Remi, whose nom de plume was Hergé;, described it in an interview in the early 1970s as "a sin of youth" - while making the perfectly fair point that it was "typical of the Belgian bourgeois mentality of the time."
To modern eyes, the caricatures in the Congo album are unquestionably crude and racist. But Hergé later - notably in The Blue Lotus - put into Tintin's mouth some stirring anti-racist rhetoric, well ahead of its time.
In any case, all that is quite irrelevant. If Tintin in the Congo were a new book, Borders would be right to refuse to stock it altogether. But it is a product of its time. To isolate it from its sister volumes, as if it were a contagious disease, is both futile and an insult to readers. Plenty of great works - including the Bible and much of the works of Shakespeare - contain material contrary to decent modern belief. But kids - especially Tintin's sophisticated fan base - can see that for themselves. They don't need someone telling them, 70 years after the event, what is and is not acceptable to read.
