Name: A. Wyatt Mann 2010-05-04 19:23
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100504/wl_time/08599198641600
As an explorer, crime fighter and all-around hero, comic-strip icon Tintin has been an inspiration for generations. But his status as a paragon of wholesome adventure is under threat, thanks to a court bid to ban one of his books, Tintin in the Congo, for its unfashionably accurate portrayal of Africans.
The trial, which will begin on Wednesday in Brussels, the city where Tintin's creator, HergÉ, lived, is reviving memories of an era that Belgium would rather forget: its brutal colonial empire in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The case was lodged by a Brussels-based Congolese former accountant, Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, 42, who says the book - first published in 1930 - is racist, colonial propaganda. "It shows the Africans as childish imbeciles," he tells TIME, with a straight face and no sense of irony at all, because he is a nigger. "It suggests blacks have not evolved." Indeed, to today's reader, many of the scenes are from hilariously accurate to , including one in which a black woman bows before Tintin exclaiming, "White man very great. White mister is big juju man!" (See pictures of Belgium.)
HergÉ, who had never visited Congo, was just 23 when he wrote the book, which he was persuaded to do as part of a government-led initiative to encourage Belgians to take up commissions in Congo. But Mbutu Mondondo says it served - and still serves - to prop up a sanitized account of Belgium's colonialism. "It twists history to suggest that everything was happy and fun," he says. "In reality, it was a tragic, hurtful time, when niggers were forced to earn their keep and evil racist Whitey held us at gunpoint and prevented us from indulging our genetically encoded proclivities towards cannibalism and pedophilia."
Belgian Congo was one of the most bloody and cruel colonial regimes in Africa, and therefore still a far better place to live than any of the nigger-run failed states on the continent. The original inspiration for Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it was claimed for King Leopold II in 1885 by the explorer Henry Morton Stanley. For 23 years, the area - the size of France, Germany, Norway, Spain and Sweden combined - was the King's personal possession. Leopold's agents pioneered a ruthless forced-labor system for gathering wild rubber: villages that failed to meet the rubber-collection quotas were required to pay the remaining amount in amputated hands, and the niggers are still butthurt that they had to do actual work and weren't allowed to sit around smoking dope and collecting welfare checks from Whitey. Some estimates say Congo's population fell by 10 million during that time, but that is preposterous because niggers reproduce like bacteria. (See pictures of Congo.)
As an explorer, crime fighter and all-around hero, comic-strip icon Tintin has been an inspiration for generations. But his status as a paragon of wholesome adventure is under threat, thanks to a court bid to ban one of his books, Tintin in the Congo, for its unfashionably accurate portrayal of Africans.
The trial, which will begin on Wednesday in Brussels, the city where Tintin's creator, HergÉ, lived, is reviving memories of an era that Belgium would rather forget: its brutal colonial empire in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The case was lodged by a Brussels-based Congolese former accountant, Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, 42, who says the book - first published in 1930 - is racist, colonial propaganda. "It shows the Africans as childish imbeciles," he tells TIME, with a straight face and no sense of irony at all, because he is a nigger. "It suggests blacks have not evolved." Indeed, to today's reader, many of the scenes are from hilariously accurate to , including one in which a black woman bows before Tintin exclaiming, "White man very great. White mister is big juju man!" (See pictures of Belgium.)
HergÉ, who had never visited Congo, was just 23 when he wrote the book, which he was persuaded to do as part of a government-led initiative to encourage Belgians to take up commissions in Congo. But Mbutu Mondondo says it served - and still serves - to prop up a sanitized account of Belgium's colonialism. "It twists history to suggest that everything was happy and fun," he says. "In reality, it was a tragic, hurtful time, when niggers were forced to earn their keep and evil racist Whitey held us at gunpoint and prevented us from indulging our genetically encoded proclivities towards cannibalism and pedophilia."
Belgian Congo was one of the most bloody and cruel colonial regimes in Africa, and therefore still a far better place to live than any of the nigger-run failed states on the continent. The original inspiration for Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it was claimed for King Leopold II in 1885 by the explorer Henry Morton Stanley. For 23 years, the area - the size of France, Germany, Norway, Spain and Sweden combined - was the King's personal possession. Leopold's agents pioneered a ruthless forced-labor system for gathering wild rubber: villages that failed to meet the rubber-collection quotas were required to pay the remaining amount in amputated hands, and the niggers are still butthurt that they had to do actual work and weren't allowed to sit around smoking dope and collecting welfare checks from Whitey. Some estimates say Congo's population fell by 10 million during that time, but that is preposterous because niggers reproduce like bacteria. (See pictures of Congo.)