Saif Shakir - Tintin in Congo

 “Tintin in the Congo” Summary

This story starts out with Tintin and Snowy traveling to the Belgian Congo, and once they reach the Congo, they meet up with their travel guide named Coco. As Tintin is traveling through Congo, he notices a similar face from the ship to Congo, and this mysterious man attempts to murder Tintin. Luckily, Tintin is saved by monkeys who throw coconuts down from the trees which then hits the man's head. Tintin immediately flees from the scene, and the following day, Tintin gets into a car crash, but luckily a reporter spots them and is able to tow their car and bring them to his local village. In that village, Tintin is greeted by the king, and the king offers to go hunting with him. When Tintin is hunting with the king, he is knocked unconscious by a lion. Right when Tintin is about to be devoured by the lion, Snowy comes and bites off the lion's tail which makes it run away.

When Tintin comes back alive with the king, he is looked at as a hero by the whole tribe. However, the witch-doctor is jealous of Tintin's fame, so he accuses Tintin of destroying the sacred idol. Tintin is imprisoned, but luckily is proven to be innocent by the security footage which shows the man from the boat and also the witch-doctor. After this, the witch-doctor decides to formulate another plan to try and make it look like Tintin was killed by a leopard. However, Tintin is able to outsmart the witch doctor, and even save him from being killed by a boa snake. After this happens, the man on the boat comes back and tries to finish Tintin off, but Tintin is disguised as a Christian missionary, and pushes the man from the boat into the river where he is eaten alive by ravenous crocodiles.

Once Tintin goes to check on the man, he finds a letter in his pocket which has an order to kill Tintin, and it is signed by the initials of A.I. Eventually, Tintin finds out that these are the initials of a man named Al Capone, who is diamond smuggler in Africa, and he ordered Tintin to be killed because he knew that Tintin could find out about his scheme. The story ends with Tintin capturing the drug smuggler, and Tintin continues on with his journey around the world.

Review

Overall, I felt like this comic book was quite controversial, especially the way that Herge depicted the African people, which was quite repelling. Herge portrayed Africans as people who were extremely dark in complexion, wide facial features, and all the African characters looked extremely similar (which is unlike any of the European portrayals). The art style in this comic was so repulsive that it distracted from the plot of the story making it hard for me to truly enjoy this series. I’m quite disappointed in this comic’s depiction of Africans, but when doing further research into this, I found that it was written in the early 1930’s. This obviously doesn’t justify any of the portrayals by the author, but at the time, that was the common idea for the African community by the Europeans. Seeing the depiction of the African community made me look back into the other stories, and I actually noticed that some of the Arab people in “The Claws of the Golden Crab” were also shown in a very stereotypical way. The more I started to think about these hidden messages within the story, the less I enjoyed reading this series.

When it comes down to the plot of this story, I honestly felt like it was repetitive, and it got boring once Tintin was saved for the fourth time. Not only was the plot repetitive, but even the characters in this story had identical personalities to some of the other characters in the other stories.

Rating

To be quite honest, this comic was a 4.5 out of 10 due to its repetitive nature, repelling portrayal of foreign characters, and I believe that these two major factors put an end to my journey through this Tintin comic series. I would recommend people to read some of the other comics in this series, but after you read the whole series, it becomes less intriguing and too repetitive.