(PHOTO 2: Belgium-based Congolese Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, anti-Tintin
in the Congo crusader)
***
I have time and again denounced on this blog the frivolous crusade
against "Tintin in the Congo" launched about 4 years ago by the
fame-seeking mercurial Congolese student Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo.
Mondondo had filed a lawsuit against the Tintin series Belgian
publisher Casteman and SA Moulinsart, the company holding the
exclusive rights of the author known as Hergé (Rémi Georges).
Soon enough, the French government-funded
"anti-defamation-league"-like group called CRAN--Conseil Représentatif
des Associations Noires (the Representative Council of Black
Associations)--jumped into the bandwagon as co-plaintiff.
Mondondo and CRAN were suing "Tintin in the Congo," published in 1930,
on the basis of a 1981 Belgian law against racism.
They wanted Casterman and Moulinsart to "cease any commercial
exploitation" of the comic book, to have it removed from kids' library
bookshelves, and for copies of it in adult libraries to carry a
warning to readers about its alleged virulent racist content.
As their lawyer argued in lower court in a florid display of
political- correctness amok coupled with undigested psychobabble:
"The stereotypes contained in this book read by a countless number of
children have still consequences on their behavior currently."
(Last year I ranted at great length on this blog against another
instance of political-correcteness run amok in the form of the "recent
assault on Mark Twain in the U.S. where some wacky editors have just
taken upon themselves to replace in his "Huckleberry Finn" the words
"nigger(s)" and "Injian(s)" with respectively "slave(s)" and
"Indian(s)". And I linked the assault on "Huckleberry Finn" to
Mondondo's attacks against "Tintin in the Congo.")
Last year a Begian lower court ruled that "Tintin in the Congo" was
not racist, a ruling the plaintiffs immediately appealed.
And Wednesday, December 5, the Brussels Appellate Court affirmed the
trial court.
The opinion of the Appellate Court reads in part:
"If we were to follow the appellants, for whom it would suffice to
take into account the simple intent of publishing a book, that would
require banning today, for instance, the publication of some of the
works of Voltaire, whose racism, notably toward Blacks and Jews, was
inherent to his thought, as well as whole segments of literature,
which cannot be accepted [as] the passage of time must be taken into
account."
The Appellate Court further stated that Hergé didn't create a comic
strip in order to convey ideas of a"racist, hurtful, humiliating or
degrading nature toward Congolese."
Adding:
"Hergé limited himself to producing a work of fiction with the sole
objective of entertaining his readers. He carries out therein candid
and gentle humor."
The Appellate Court finally debunks the "new historicist" argument of
the plaintiffs by reminding them that Hergé, who never set foot in the
Congo to begin with, researched his subject--the Congo of the time--at
the Tervuren Colonial Museum and was therefore only reproducing the
stereotypes conveyed by the bourgeois Catholic milieu of that
Zeitgeist.
"It is above all a testament to the common history of Belgium and the
Congo at a given epoch," the Appellate Court concluded.
As the Congolese painter Tshibumba
Kanda Matulu--"disappeared" by Mobutu in Lubumbashi--once quipped in a
fieldwork interview with anthropologist Johannes Fabian on one of the
most vivid subplots in "Tintin au Congo":
"The leopard man should grab Tintin Instead a snake grabs the leopard
man."
Let's just hope that henceforth the leopard man Bienvenu Mbutu
Mondondo will leave Tintin alone and find another conspiracy theory to
waste his time on...
---With levif.be; lemonde.fr; & lefigaro.fr--
***
CREDITS: Image 1: lemonde.fr; & Photo 2: Internet sources.
