Tintin in the Congo, and Corto Maltese

This was my column in The Malta Independent on Sunday, yesterday.

If we were to begin banning, revising, editing and issuing warnings about books written in another era by and for people whose manners and mores were vastly different to today’s, where would it end?

Should we stick to children’s books that are still in print and popular, on the grounds that today’s children may take those attitudes as contemporary fact rather than as historical curiosities?

Or should we police the libraries and print lists of the world’s publishers, seeking rulings against anything which offends 21st-century western attitudes, even if written for adults who are perfectly capable of putting old-fashioned words and views, now considered offensive, into the context of the times when they were first written?

I’m all for leaving things as they are. Original manuscripts are a historical record, and that is quite apart from their literary value. Nobody suggests editing, revising or banning Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice on the grounds that Shylock is a racist parody of a Jew, or Othello because it puts ‘Moorish’ people in a bad light. Quite apart from the unquestionable literary value of those works, which would make tampering with them sacrilege, they were written and are set so far back in time that even the most childish reader will not mistake anything in them as contemporary thinking.

Or perhaps not – the negative stereotyping of Jews, the suspicion of North Africans and dark-skinned foreigners, both have echoes in our own time and our society.

The publisher of the iconic Tintin cartoon books, which have been wildly popular since their creation in the 1930s, is currently under siege by a civil rights group for continuing to publish Tintin in the Congo, in which the Belgian reporter Tintin (white, imperialist ) visits the African colony and observes the Negroes (bulging eyes, large nostrils, enormous mouths and a tendency to grovel and to speak like intellectually deficient children) in their native habitat.

I had that book as a child or if not, then at least I remember reading it. I also had Enid Blyton’s The Three Golliwogs, ate strawberry jam out of a jar decorated with the Robertson’s golliwog logo (this would have been before the Mintoff/KMB ban on all jam bar that from our friends in Communist Bulgaria) and one of my sisters toted a golliwog rag-doll about with her. I don’t think it did any lasting damage.

I can see why African people and those of African descent would take offence at that absurd level of offensive stereotyping. I know exactly how they feel, because there is any number of popular books from the same era and right up to the 1970s in which girls are reliably stereotyped as wet and helpless. Janet puts on her frilly apron and helps mummy bake cakes while John, wearing shorts, plays football in the garden.

Those tales of woe were outdated already when the Ladybird editions landed on my classroom table: 40 years ago, we girls wore jeans and tennis shoes and played on the streets and beaches of Sliema. We certainly didn’t stay indoors wearing frills and baking copiously with our mothers (nor did most of our mothers, for that matter). Of course, we also had dolls and party-dresses, but the one did not preclude the other and we, too, wore shorts and had footballs.

If the girls in those stories are not wet and helpless, then they are either dreadful harridans or perverted paragons of arch-femininity, like Violet Elizabeth Bott in the Just William series from the 1920s, with her ringlets, ribbons, white ankle socks, polished shoes, frilly petticoats, shrill voice and hysterical demeanour (“If we don’t do what I say, then I shall scream and scream”).

Or they enjoy doing ‘boys’ things’ – which means anything fun and interesting – and so must obviously be incipient butch dykes, with boyish names, boyish hair-cuts, boyish clothes and a boyish temperament, like George (Georgina) in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. But even George is allowed to go only so far.

When she tries to join the male members of the Famous Five on an expedition to explore a coal-hole, she is told in no uncertain terms by one of them: “You may look like a boy and behave like a boy, but you’re a girl all the same. And like it or not, girls have got to be taken care of.”

In Tintin’s native Belgium, a court last month dismissed a Congolese man’s request that Tintin in the Congo be banned. The court argued that the book and its characters cannot be considered outside the historical context in which they were created, which was the Belgian colonial era of the 1930s.

It also said that Tintin’s creator, Herge (Georges Remi, who died in 1983), couldn’t possibly have been motivated by the desire to discriminate against Congolese people or Africans in general. The complainant, Mbutu Mondondo, has fought this particular battle for years, trying to get Tintin in the Congo banned or least oblige the publisher to slap a warning label on it explaining that it was written in a different time.

Perhaps it is just as well that the sort of touchy Maltese who post comments in high dudgeon beneath internet stories they consider offensive to the dignity of our nation remain blissfully unaware of the popular longevity of Corto Maltese (‘(the) Short Maltese’), Italy’s answer to Tintin, created by Hugo Pratt in 1967.

The character Corto Maltese is described as having been born in Valletta in 1887, the bastard of a British sailor and a Gibraltarian whore. His mother’s work takes her to the Jewish quarter of Cordoba, where he grows up. He spends his life wandering the Mediterranean getting into magnificent scrapes with the law, having carved his own fate-line on the palm of his hand, sticking up for the underdog.

So, for small mercies let us be grateful: Corto Maltese did not take the time-honoured path of brothel-keeping or white slavery, otherwise known as ‘ihaddem in-nisa’. Instead of pimping the underdog, he champions it. Edward Scicluna will like that. And somebody should tell Joseph Muscat that this is a cartoon we’re talking about, before he gets Cyrus to make overtures for the bandwagon.