The Commission for Racial Equality in Britain has reheated a decades-old controversy about “Tintin Au Congo’’ by condemning as racist a new English translation of the comic book. In a forthright statement issued on 12 July 2007, the commission said the book, called “Tintin In The Congo’’ in translation, uses cartoon imagery that makes Africans “look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles’’. This prompted an immediate furore among diehard Tintin fans.

The commission is right but misguided.

Nobody can deny the artwork and plotline of “Tintin Au Congo’’ are anything but racist. Native Africans are depicted as simple-minded folk incapable of doing anything sophisticated until a white man, often Tintin, takes control. The language and imagery is patronising and degrading. The publishers of the book acknowledged this by placing a warning on the new edition, although a spokesman for the Hergé Foundation later emphasised that readers should remember the book’s historical context.

Hergé, creator of the Tintin stories, knew about the racism row shortly after he produced the first edition back in 1931. Complaints were quick to arrive and when the album was redrawn in 1946 he tried to tone down the racism. This was not enough to satisfy all his critics so when the Tintin series was translated into English and printed in colour, “Tintin Au Congo’’ was the only one left out. It took until 2005 for the first, colour version in English to be produced, and it is this one that sparked the complaint by the commission, echoing the earlier complaints from the 1930s and 1940s.

The Tintin story was based by Hergé in the Belgian Congo, the colonial precursor of the modern Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the world’s most failed of failed states. During my various trips as a writer to the DRC I was struck by the way Congolese people viewed Tintin with the greatest of affection in spite of the racist undertones.

For the street kids of Kinshasa, the decrepit modern capital of the DRC, the debate about racism is irrelevant. When I was in the the city I was mobbed by hawkers who exploit the imagery of “Tintin Au Congo’’ as a key income source.

I was offered painted wooden carvings of the intrepid cub reporter, capped by the topi given to him by for his African adventure. Other street artists had used shards from tin cans to weave perfect models of the jalopy Tintin drives across the Congolese savannah. They even recreated the crudely rubber-lipped Coco who accompanies Tintin in the subservient role of `boy’.

For the desperately poor street children in the DRC the debate about Tintin’s racism is a luxury they cannot afford. Selling trinkets is their only source of income and they will do pretty much anything to earn a few Congolese francs. In the bloody aftermath of the assassination of Laurent Kabila, one of the country’s dictators, I watched as white shop owners boarded up their businesses while the hawkers ventured out onto the dirty, dangerous streets to sell their Tintin wares to the press corps, almost the only foreigners still left in Kinshasa.

Years later while crossing the Congo on my own harrowing journey, “Tintin Au Congo’’, would often come up in conversation. A spritely 82-year-old called Vermond Makungu in a landlocked ruin of town called Kasongo, over in the war-ravaged east of the DRC, dragged me to his leaky house to show me his own, sun-bleached topi. After popping it on his head he capered around crying “just like Tintin, just like Tintin’’.

It might sound perverse but Congolese like Vermond view “Tintin Au Congo’’ with a degree of pride. The Belgian Congo was one of the most racist and cruel of all colonial projects, something that Hergé’s artwork starkly reflected, but for people like Vermond that was not really relevant. The important thing was the cartoon book reminded him an age when the Congo was connected to the outside world, when a mainstream cartoonist would use their country for a best selling work.

It was a common theme that I encountered when I crossed the Congo to research `Blood River – A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart’. Deep in the sweaty rainforest of Maniema or on the vast, torpid Congo River itself, I came across Congolese who were desperate not to be left behind by the modern world and who clung onto the memory of times when Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, VS Naipaul and, even, Hergé, all wrote about their homeland.

For that reason alone, I will - one day - share “Tintin Au Congo’’ with my two children.

Official Tintin site: http://www.tintin.com/

Unofficial Tintin site: http://www.tintinologist.org/

Link to Tim’s piece in the New Statesman about Tintin: http://www.newstatesman.com/200707260020