From the cover illustration of Tintin au Congo, reproduced in many a Belgian home in Kinshasa today
Yesterday, at an impromptu outdoor salon in Hampstead, I met my first Congolese barkless dog, more correctly known as a Basenji. A close personal friend of the dog told me that it never barks, but has been known to yodel. Carvings of Basenji appear in Egyptian tombs, and they used to be popular hunting dogs in the Congo. I don’t imagine many are left there now, but here is an account of a hunt by an Englishwoman visiting ‘the interior’ in 1937:
At the end of the dry season, the natives burn whole tracts of bush – strictly forbidden by the State – to round up game. The excitement – and, I may add, the danger – is great. Imagine the roar and crackle of mighty flame. Terrified game – antelope, bush pig, wild fowl, not to mention snakes – rushing out from the advancing inferno – unclad, gleaming figures of shouting, gesticulating natives! Old flintlock guns going off with ear-splitting bangs! Arrows flying, and everywhere, little red dogs, darting hither and thither, adding more excitement to the scene. They will follow up wounded game for miles, and pull it down, holding it until the hunter catches up. As they run mute, they wear little wooden gourds, tied round their loins, filled with pebbles, which rattle, so that their masters can follow them through the tall elephant grass.
Six years earlier, Hergé published his second Tintin book, Tintin au Congo, in which the young reporter (who brought his own dog) has lots of fun on safari, blasting away at the wildlife and even, believe it or not, dynamiting a rhino. Hergé apparently based much of the book on travelogues by contemporary European explorers of Africa.
In last week’s New Yorker, Anthony Lane described Tintin au Congo as ‘an unmitigated parade of racial prejudice, with bug-eyed natives swaying between ignorance and laziness’. Hergé was subsequently embarrassed enough (and perhaps freer of the influence of Wallez, his employer) to tone down the colonialist fervour for a new colour edition in 1946. For example, in the later version, Tintin teaches the locals the joys of extremely simple arithmetic instead of the wonders of Belgian rule. But the renowned illustrator remained reluctant to discuss this particular adventure, and it seems that his publishers and most of his fans would prefer to forget about it altogether.
There is no chance of doing that in Kinshasa, however, where street-traders still do a brisk trade in reproductions of the front cover and elaborate carvings of the Tintin’s jeep.
Extra: Tim Butcher on the Tintin phenomenon in DRC.
