Tintin in black and white

If Greece was the cradle of civilisation - and I should like at this early stage to remind everybody of that formidable one-liner straight from a famous Greek-wedding themed film about Greek people writing philosophy, when others were still swinging from trees - Sub-Saharan Africa was always the cradle of humanity. Ultimately everybody in this world has roots in the southern half of Africa. Genetical evidence doesn't lie. That big debate about Tintin in the Congo being racist is definitely obsolete, and my stance today is to prove that the colonialist accusation is also completely out of joint. Wrong target. I can prove to anybody who has eyes to see that Herge wrote under duress - it is a graphic novel after all - a masterpiece of encoded intelligence that only fools but no horses would miss out on, for common sense has become thin on earthly ground.

It has been well documented already that Herge was forced by his priestly bosses to produce a propaganda works in favour of colonialists and missionaries in the Belgian Congo. The French Catholic press too wanted him to write something Christian modelled on their French Catholic wishes, not his, that's how Jo, Zette et Jocko came to be. The young Belgian man was Christian enough to accept and lucky enough to have a job in 1930's Europe, he had to comply or he would lose everything. However he was going to lay a few mines in the propaganda camp. He was an artist, not a prostitute. A number of unorthodox monkeys are found in his cartoons, and Jocko the chimp was to take centre-stage as a mobile child protection unit, doubling as a detective and a vocal lie detector, among many other roles. I cannot but think that Herge must have been inspired by the play Jocko ou le Singe du Bresil, itself a spin-off of Charles de Pougens' Anecdote Detachee des Lettres Inedites Sur L'Instinct des Animaux, the latter being available at Waterstone's, the play to be found online on the University of Warwickshire Archives site. My research is not exhaustive and it is hampered by our present-day living arrangements. I am afraid all these references are in the French language. I am sure translations exist somewhere. Seek and Thou Shalt Find, otherwise I offer to do the job myself as long as there aren't any legal implications. I am pretty sure the Portuguese merchant at sea who regularly appears in Tintin's adventures is a souvenir of the one in ''Jocko the Brazilian ape''. The French Catholic press didn't like abnormally young single Tintin for its Coeurs Vaillants youth journal, so Herge had to invent another story with ''a proper family'' and a pet, hence Jocko. Not a dog called Medor, the French equivalent of Rex. Vive Darwin, Herge seemed to be saying, joining the French writers' chorus singing the praise of nature with a somewhat Rousseauist approach to its alleged innate innocence. Vive le punch line opening Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice I say, ''It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife''. And to conclude my little aside, I shall refer the reader to this wonderful filmed adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, the old one with Julie Christie, where a shepherd ruined by a mad dog chasing his flock down a cliff declares, ''thank God I haven't married''. So Herge born and raised a Catholic solved in one fell swoop the evolutionist vs creationist controversy by creating a talking hero-chimp only readers can understand. Same thing with Snowy the dog. Tintin stays young, celibate and always onto the next case. A fqte that may have been Herge's own wishful thinking, as in his days males were directly handed over from mum to wife, there was very little room to manoeuvre into a lad's single life without the involvement of a personal fortune. Herge's wife had a soft toy monkey whose photo can be found on Tintinomania.com, along with a lot of information on this very intelligent writer. A word of caution: the eyes of the innocent have to be protected, as the furry thing (the monkey, not the wife) holding a nana is worth its own weight in peanuts, as a token of the much-loved, much-hugged and much played-with vintage soft toy of the great unwashable sort. I am not that old and I remember my teddy bear, filled with straw, fitted with split pins and cardboard shapes to make the arms and legs move. They showed after a while. The fur became patchy and he lost his ears, but I loved the bear as he was. He was a brown bear more forward than myself. Forced labour takes us to such strange places in the human psyche.

So the cliched, conformist, run-of-the-mill propaganda works Herge was forced to carry out was in fact a time-bomb: the monkey apes, the parrot fashions. The very opening lines in Tintin in the Congo fire up with the dog Snowy getting bitten by a parrot and finding himself in danger of catching psittacosis, a parrot disease the name of which is very close to the human disorder called echolalia, or psittacisme in the French language. Indeed. A fight ensues, mirroring I think the inner struggle of the author not keen on selling out. If you like foul-mouthed French parrots, I cannot but recommend the story of Vert-Vert. The thing stays with waterborne hauliers and learns excusable French. On his way to Africa, Tintin's dog is also unnecessarily worried first by superstitious beliefs commonly held in Europe (the spider, the broken mirror) and the parrot's biting tongue, then by the sight of a black man carrying a cutting tool, in fact a carpenter carrying a saw. A black carpenter in a cartoon made for the Catholic propaganda press, right. Beware, beware of Belgian pictorial artists, centuries of multiple occupations and heavy-duty censorship have turned them into the finest secret satirists: I worship Jan Van Eyck, the godfather of all graffiti artists, who established with The Arnolfinis not only the innovating art of the Northern Renaissance, but also the art of being a dissenting trader with whom he dangerously sided, painting a couple of very successful merchants in an era when nobody was supposed to rise above King and Church in power, money and influence. Change is not all about les Mis. It started then and there, and that picture to me signals the end of the Dark Ages better than any wars, revolutions and fights for territorial or spiritual powers. The merchants did it all, dragging science into improving their activities, not the other way round as the French believe. Their fanatics wanted to replace religion by setting up science as the new god, then Aids, Ebola and Covid hit out, to name but a few, and the god tumbled down. It can't stop viruses from appearing and raging. I so like Azem Kucana's Poseidon's Sadness, a very successful painting in grey, the most difficult colour to paint with, and en masse if you please. Once upon a time, there was a boat with all the trimmings not because the engineer had fancied building one, but because the merchant navy needed one, the same as they needed priests, doctors, chemists and inventors to keep their goods, their journeys - and their sailors - safe. That's all there is to this world. I've said it before, the savage in the forest knows better, he trades before he does anything else judged less ''primitive''. That's why you have chimps trading hats and blows with Tintin in the Congo trees. That is also why you have the mild-mannered Portuguese merchant popping up all over the world in Tintin's adventures. Trade and capitalism don't win, they triumph, otherwise I wouldn't be able to daub the Internet walls I paid for the way I do. I cannot get enough of the Arnolfinis, I have a weakness for Albrecht Durer too. Van Eyck is a perfusion to me the same way Turing's Enigma Machine is; and of course the Book's exegesis. Are we civilised by the Greeks, or what?

It is not therefore by chance that the colourful parrot calls Snowy ''dirty dog''. There is a bit of self-hatred pervading the album, it is the only one where Tintin is seen hunting and killing animals for sport, and it is a credit to the artist to have expressed dissenting views over colonial rule and propaganda by making an otherwise innocuous and blatantly idealistic, justice-seeking hero behave so scandalously in public sight. Opposite the spectrum, in The Black Island, my favourite of course, Tintin rescues a massive gorilla drugged up by villains to be used as ''a deterrent weapon'' dangerous to human life. Most villains are White males, so Tintin does fight either his own or westernised gang members, with the notable exception of Asia, but then he was always fighting organised crime and organised crime doesn't have a specific nationality, it only has a specific aim, that of criminal activity. I like the way he wants to help the Chinese and Indian parents whose sons are in danger. Herge was ahead of his times in his crime-fighting capers. The general public was discovering far-reaching international conspiracies such as Al Capone's, along with the advantages of the new worldwide transport network. Tintin is always jumping from cars, trains, boats, planes; so are the criminals he hotly pursues.

Tintin in the Congo also twists the sartorial tradition that demands of Tintin that he don the national garb of the country he visits for professional purposes. Why does he wear a colonial suit or a chimp costume of dubious origins? It is not like him. His visits to the missions looks like a compulsory school trip to the museum, although the priests save his life on more than one occasion. I visited the Laeken Leopold Museum on Africa a long time ago, it was scary. High-ceilinged, huge, cold rooms with artefacts that looked totally dead. It felt like walking in a huge sarcophagus. I shouldn't say it, but it reminded me of a Fascist-style Romanised amphitheatre I visited in Italy. You can see the same sort of room in Tea with Mussolini, in the tea with M scene. The Belgian museum has been closed and refurbished since. To get back to Tintin in Africa, maybe Herge felt obliged to be fair to the missionaries. After all, they had schooled him and they paid his wages. I see some biblical allusion in reverse in the boa suddenly fitted with legs, the notorious snake now being punished with them rather than deprived of the original ones before sin. Tintin faithful to innocence always befriends local kids wherever he goes, his creator may have felt more comfortable with child-like feelings and uncomplicated adventures than the niceties of the White Man's Burden, with some Whites providing a much needed infrastructure to lands under their dominions, whether by necessity, belief or greed, and some others opting for criminal activities. It has to be said they are seen leading astray a black magician belonging to the Aniota cult, an anti-White cult that did exist and whose members carried out murders execution style in an attempt to get the White invaders out. What is not innocent is that such a character as the Aniota man is plotting with a White man belonging to the notorious Brotherhood; they both want to carry out blood crimes, the murder of Tintin of course, and undoubtedly many others. What their business is about is obvious to the most innocent person. Titin remains innocent as long as crime is not concerned. In such cases as the Aniota cult, I ask myself if any indigenous cult peters out because urbanisation and mechanisation bear more attractions to the locals than risking their hide in the unforgiving wilderness, or if cults disappear for want of ready-to-die bods. Such fights are always going to be lost battles from the start. Only a narrative can really settle the score, and there is no saying that some are still not going to lose out on the settled score.

The ones who like to lean over may want to consider the role given to Pygmees in the Congo book and their fate in our sad reality. The most important is not whether Tintin is racist or not, the most important is that he shouldn't be banned at the moment said Pygmees are made to disappear, and that with the help of renegade Black persons who should know better than attack or neglect their own on the account of foreigners wanting their timber - said foreigner not always a Pale Face, or their temporary support. Gone the issue, forgotten the Black man. I never saw any politically correct person being grateful to anybody, quite the opposite in fact; on a presse le citron il faut jeter la peau, as they say in an old French anti-colonial song; you squeeze a lemon, then you throw away the peel. It is shameful to accuse Tintin of racism whilst dropping the Pygmees in it, whilst the ignorant world looks elsewhere, preferably at pint-size Politically Correct issues. What an awful load of dog bits. Has the PC brigade been bitten by a cartoonish parrot I wonder. The Pygmees are so ancient they are mentioned by Ancient Greeks, and that the name we know them under is derived from the Greek word for ''half arm-length''. Once more, Tintin is there for the little people, children or grown men. And women. And LGBT too, if you will have it so, after all he changes ID often enough throughout his adventures.

I kept the best bit for the end.

From the circumstantial puppet of the first pages of Tintin in the Congo to the outrageous end - not at all what you think you see when you are shown the typical huts and the indigenous population - Tintin succeeds to revert to the great tradition of being his true self, running from and escaping great danger to save his world. In the end of the story, he is a wildlife photographer and he is given the chase by irate buffaloes he offended, only to be rescued last minute by pilots who are looking to fish him back from Africa to throw him into the next adventure, America this time. I have to take this opportunity to say that the idiots who sought to ban Tintin in the Land of the Soviets have it coming with Tintin in America. The criticism of Puritanical beliefs in the US of A is even more ferocious that the Soviet-bashing of the first album; I am yet to hear anybody being clamorous about the anti-capitalistic anti-meat trade anti Volstead Act anti-Indian reservation stance it may be among other things. It is not because it is a cartoon that it is simple, child-like, and therefore an easy target. Human stupidity doesn't know boundaries.

Luckily Tintin escapes the bulls and their well-known droppings for us to see the magnificent pie in the sky Herge has lovingly cooked up for us. The last round shape image, as seen through a lens is not that of a traditional African village with thatched huts. It is PajottenLand, the Land of Thatched Huts, a Flemish rural area outside Brussels with thatched cottages and pubs, this time with an additional Flamant-d on top of the game, not a Belgian French rooster, the symbol of the Walloons. Flamingo in the French language is un flamant with a t, and in an extraordinarily intelligent Thompson and Thomson switch, it is also un Flamand with a d, pronounced exactly the same way, but this time indicating a Flemish national, a Northern Belgian with a lion for symbol. The French word for huts is payottes, possibly from paille, the straw covering the roofs. In a corner of the photographic village, Tintin and his dog are idolised as effigies of a small sort of size, figurines really. The abandoned camera - do I see a Vermeer here? - stays with the Africans on film. They have the last laugh, Murnau-style. It is sublime. What an extraordinary, daring feat, a man on orders to write something glorifying a Belgian colony in Africa manages to hide in the hot potato a message about the then-colonising, patronising, discriminatory way the Belgian French elite treated the Flemish Dutch-speaking population, who were at the time also economically disadvantaged, quasi- subdued in the manner of a vanquished people. They had the ports and the fields, but prosperous, money-making industries were south of the country in Wallonie, that some of you may now know under the unflattering name of rust belt. Flemish people are still irking, not least also because a lot of their soldiers got killed during WWI for want of understanding orders given exclusively in French. Look not at the straw in my eye, but at the beam in your own, that is the ultimate meaning of Tintin in the Congo. Paintings, Drawings, Photos:

all looks that can kill.