When analyzing Tintin in the Congo, it’s easy to feel as if you’re ticking off boxes on a how-to list for colonizers who want to misrepresent Africa. Dehumanize Africans by likening them to monkeys: checkmark. Show white men bettering infantile Africans: checkmark. Tintin in the Congo becomes a caricature of caricaturing Africa. Even the dog, Snowy, is a stern overseer of the Congolese. Although Tintin in the Congo is not nearly as ethically ambiguous or artistically creative as the award-winning, visually stunning film, The Enclave, certain representations of the Congo are common to both of them.

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Tintin and the Congo

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Tintin in the Congo is a children’s cartoon, and so its representations of the Congo are uniquely problematic. Cartoons for children often cannot feature death or maiming. When cartoons are battered, they soon recover. Looney Toons exemplifies this. Anvils routinely drop on heads, but only leave cartoons dazed and with a nasty bruise. Elmer Fudd shoots characters like Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, but their injuries are temporary and amusing. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a cartoon is murdered—something incredibly shocking in that fictive universe, since cartoons are, in a reference to common cartoon tropes, thought to be immortal. Similar themes of cartoon invulnerability appear in Tintin in the Congo. Consider the following panels:

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Here, Tintin punches a witchdoctor. Not to worry, though. A few panels later, the witchdoctor is as spry as ever:

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Now look at the following panels, in which the disguised witchdoctor sneaks up on Tintin. A snake pounces on him at the last second, thwarting the attempted murder:

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The depictions of Tintin punching the witchdoctor, and the failed murder, are lighthearted in tone. But their implications are sinister. Tintin knocking an African unconscious becomes inconsequential, and by extension trivializes the violence of a white man in a Belgian colony for child readers. After all, the violence was likely meant to make children laugh or become excited, just as watching Elmer Fudd shoot Daffy Duck in the face is meant to be amusing. Moreover, these panels portray Tintin as invulnerable and with nearly superhuman strength. Notice his easy gait and the casualness with which he extends his arm. It looks as if he’s reaching for something, not fighting. There is even a cumbersome tripod propped on his shoulder. Regardless, he knocks a fully grown man over like a broom. Similarly, the foiled murder is one of many instances of Tintin narrowly escaping death. On multiple occasions, he even dodges bullets.[1] His imperviousness to injury portrays African violence against whites as laughably pathetic, insinuating that the whites colonizing Africa are juggernauts superior to Africans. These panels depict Africans in Tintin in the Congo as ineffectual, and Tintin’s violence as only exciting action or slapstick humour.

Heart of Darkness

When a huge snake attacks the witchdoctor, Tintin in the Congo hyperbolizes Congolese nature. Exaggerating the size of plants and animals occurs in many Western representations of the Congo. In order to appreciate this trope’s significance in Tintin in the Congo, we should examine how it functions in the novella that popularized it, Heart of Darkness. Marlow, the protagonist, recounts: “Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings,”[2] and, “Trees, trees, millions of tree, massive, immense, running up high; at their foot, hugging the bank . . . crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico.”[3] These descriptions hyperbolize Congolese nature by depicting the riverside vegetation as towering over the puny human presence. Fauna also overwhelms humans:

“There was an old hippo that had the bad habit of getting out on the bank and roaming at night over the station grounds. The pilgrims used to turn out in a body and empty every rifle they could lay hands on at him. Some even had sat up o’ nights for him. All this energy was wasted, though.”[4]

In this passage, the hippo is a ghostly, nocturnal menace. The men are unable to stop it, despite their repeated fusillades, endowing the hippo with an aura of indomitably.

Hyperbolizing the environment in Heart of Darkness asserts that Africa is the dangerous antithesis to civilization. If the environment overwhelms human settlements, the novella insinuates, then there can be no civilization, since orderly settlement is a criteria of any civilization. The writer and philosopher Chinua Achebe attributed Heart of Darkness’ denial that Africa had civilization to the Western psyche’s need for Africa to function as a foil that allows Europe’s civilization to manifest itself.[5]

Heart of Darkness also asserts that Africa has no civilization by dehumanizing Africans. Certain racist ideologies held that Africans were only quasi-human, and that Africa therefore could not have had civilization, since civilization was allegedly a characteristic of fully evolved humans. Heart of Darkness dehumanizes Africans by depicting them as specially and ontologically less developed than Europeans; they are both bestial and half-intangible. Focus on how Marlow describes the Africans in a decrepit station:

“Black shapes crouched, lay . . . they were nothing earthly now,—nothing but black shadows . . . These moribund shapes were free as air—and nearly as thin . . . Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up . . . his brother phantom rested its forehead . . . While I stood horror-struck, one of these creatures rose to its hands and knees and went off on all fours towards the river to drink.”[6]

Portraying African bodies as one-dimensional, ethereal, or as clumps of geometry dehumanizes Africans by reducing their ontological status; they are made less human by being made less physical. Marlow accentuates their dehumanization by referring to an African as “it” and a “creature.”

When Africans are not starving, Marlow dehumanizes them by likening them to animals and by erasing individual personhood. Marlow describes an African crew member of his steamer as akin to “a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind legs.”[7] His hair is described as “wool” on his pate.[8] Other times, the dehumanization in Heart of Darkness operates via writing against the typical self-image of humans: “. . . . there would be a . . . burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling . . .”[9] Humans conceptualize themselves as single, unified wholes. Here, Marlow disintegrates humans into a hodgepodge of anonymous, biological accoutrements. By portraying African villagers as various body parts, Marlow depicts them not as human individuals, but as an assortment of depersonalized, frenetic blackness.

In a similar vein, Tintin in the Congo hyperbolizes Congolese nature and dehumanizes Africans. Tintin and Snowy escape swarms of crocodiles, battle snakes, and humiliate lions. The backdrop of these often violent encounters is massive trees and walls of foliage. Consider the following panels:

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Achebe argued that exaggerating Congolese nature and dehumanizing the Congolese asserted Europe’s civilized status by using Africa as a contrast. Tintin in the Congo’s hyperbolizing of Congolese nature might have had different consequences. Central to justifications for European colonialism was the belief that land belonged to whoever could control it and develop it more. That is, land belonged to whoever could bring “civilization” to it. John Winthrop, one of the leading figures in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, declared that America was vacuum domicilium—i.e., legally “waste”—because Native Americans had not “subdued” it by supposedly not forming agricultural settlements.[10] Philosopher John Locke espoused that expending labour upon land created property rights.[11] Depicting nature as rampant was thus an assertion that the Congolese had not expended labour upon the Congo, and that the Congo was vacuum domicilium. Consequently, colonists would have thought of it as without civilization and therefore rightly belonging to Europeans who would impose order onto it. Tintin in the Congo makes it very clear that the Belgians are supposed to be the saviours and rightful owners of the Congo when a missionary enthuses that his mission has converted a place of “bush” into a productive enclave of civilization:

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Tintin in the Congo also inherited the trope of portraying Africans as animals from Heart of Darkness. In Tintin in the Congo, Africans are simian rough-drafts of fully evolved Europeans:

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Let’s ignore the macabre fact that Tintin is in the skin of an eviscerated monkey, and spot the differences between the monkey and the Congolese boy. The boy wears clothing. The monkey doesn’t, excepting the hat. The fact that they are both pitch black mitigates the biggest difference between them: the monkey is furry, whereas the boy is relatively hairless. Likewise, they become even more similar due to the fact that neither speaks “proper” French; this may seem obvious, but it is significant. The monkey grunts its own language comprehensible to Tintin. The Congolese boy speaks “pidgin” French. This shows that Tintin in the Congo situates Africans on a spectrum halfway between being a fully evolved and fluently Francophone European, and a grunting monkey. The tropes of hyperbolic nature and dehumanizing Africans by likening them to animals are therefore common to both Tintin in the Congo and Heart of Darkness.

The Enclave

Departing from such unnuanced, blatantly racist depictions of the Congo is The Enclave, a film made by Richard Mosse, Trevor Tweeten, and Ben Frost. It is a compilation of footage of the soldiers, refugee camps, and landscapes of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Shot with an Aerochrome film that makes the region’s foliage a lurid pink, The Enclave also inherits the trope of hyperbolizing Congolese nature. Mosse says that he used the Aerochrome film because it makes the unseen visible—it was, after all, developed by the United States military to detect the heat-signatures given off by camouflaged soldiers. Bearing this in mind, Mosse believed that he could bring a heightened visibility to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s overlooked humanitarian crisis.[12] Mosse goes so far as to say that the North and South Kivus are “an opaque place.”[13] Though Western media contributes to opacity by not documenting the conflict there, Mosse’s comment also reflects the influence that another Western trope had on him: Heart of Darkness’s tendency to characterize the Congo via “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery.”[14] In Heart of Darkness, the frequency with which Marlow uses adjectives like “unknowable” and “inscrutable” to describe the Congo portrays it as if it were a place that the mind could never understand. Consequently The Enclave highlights an overlooked conflict in the Congo, even as Mosse himself perpetuates a trope of the Congo being a turbid, confusing place.

Mosse’s comment encapsulates the ambivalence and ambiguity that characterizes The Enclave. Does the Aerochrome film that turns everything pink really make the D.R.C., and by extension its crisis, hyper-visible? Or does it cast the landscape as alien and sublime, the way Heart of Darkness portrayed it with a grotesque grandeur? Does The Enclave relegate the conflict to action that accentuates and contextualizes the beautiful landscape? Consider the following:

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In this still, the pinkness of the vegetation frames a series of thought-provoking juxtapositions. The first one revolves around clarity and the lack thereof. The vegetation is both attention-captivating and out-of-focus. Blades of grass are highlighted smears that dissolve into one another. The mountains and trees are vague. In stark contradistinction is the young soldier. We can even see the beads of his necklace. Maybe The Enclave does increase the visibility of the conflict in the D.R.C.; the pinkness captivates our attention and makes us study a photograph that many of us would’ve gazed at for a moment, then moved on from, if it was unadulterated. Perhaps many Westerners have become oversaturated with images of far-away wars, and so are only jolted into studying them when there is something emotionally or visually striking about them.

A second juxtaposition arises the more we notice the playful and theatrical qualities of this still. Posing with a floral headdress is neither fully serious in tone, nor is it something that the soldier would do if Mosse weren’t filming him. The pinkness itself also evokes a ludic capriciousness. Moreover, the soldier’s theatricality tinges the still with an unreality that undercuts seriousness, the way that a theatre-goer would experience watching Ophelia drown on stage in Hamlet as less serious than if a woman were actually dying. The youth of the soldier also makes the still seem like a snapshot of an ironic, adolescent game.

There is a flipside to this still that lays bare the theatricality’s menacing implications, and that calls its ludic quality into question, however. A pose’s playfulness might co-exist with more serious intentions, such as an attempt to demonstrate a nonchalant lethality. Moreover, the soldier’s youth, while making the posture seem like an instance of childish goofiness, draws our attention to the tragic fact that someone as young as this soldier is fighting. It also does not bode well for the professionalism, behaviour, and skilfulness of the soldiers in the D.R.C.; it is hard to imagine a young soldier conducting himself with as much restraint and maturity as we’d hope of an older one. So though the still might seem latent with irony, it conversely seems charged with a grave seriousness. Mosse alludes to this during an interview when he describes the posing as evincing “. . . play between deeply vulnerable and deeply sinister [sic].”[15]

This still from The Enclave, riddled with unresolved juxtapositions and contestations, distorts the D.R.C. insofar as it literally has distorted the colour of the vegetation. In doing so, however, it perhaps has given us insight into the complexities and contradictions of soldiering: the mixtures of militaristic swagger and playfulness that distill into half-ironic jest, and the tension between being young and being required to do things that many older adults cannot. Moreover, perhaps The Enclave, by emphasizing, then smudging the clarity of, the landscape, has put the attention of the still on a human face and has thereby humanized a conflict that remains abstract in many Western minds.

The pink in the above still is beautiful, but in other, graver photos, it seems jarring:

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The pink in this still is both pretty, and so audacious as to be ugly. At best, it seems like a mistake. At worst, it seems obscene, like flirting during a funeral. But the pink wasn’t a mistake, and so it raises the question of whether The Enclave has made a child soldier’s tragedy aesthetically beautiful, then uprooted it from the D.R.C. and used it to win the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Does the photo of an unhappy child soldier become an unconventional, and so exoticized, artwork that fetishizes human suffering? Can one read the photo metaphorically, identifying the pink vegetation as the West’s frivolous aestheticizing of the Congolese landscape, and the child soldier as the human suffering that lurks in the heart of this aestheticizing? Or is the pink a backdrop that ultimately increases the visibility of human suffering, the way a background in a bas-relief sculpture makes the subject stand out? In Richard Mosse: The Impossible Image, Mosse says that coupling beauty and suffering baffles the viewer, producing the desired effect of making them question the ethics of representation.[16] Could Mosse be trying to silence critiques on ethical grounds to The Enclave when he says this? If The Enclave is unethical, then is being unethical to produce awareness of the ethics of representation justified? Does the end erase the wrong committed to bring about that end?

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This still complicates the ethical implications of The Enclave even further. To what degree is it acceptable for someone who enjoys many forms of privilege to go to a globally unprivileged area and make art out of someone else’s misery? In an interview with Electronic Beats, Mosse says: “. . . my own works try to be true to the beauty of Congo, eastern Congo, particularly. And not to hide that away and say, ‘Oh, actually, it’s all just a hopeless disaster. Woe unto them. Pitiful squalor.’ That’s a complicated gesture. It’s hard to own a really complicated and also problematic gesture when it comes to human suffering. There’s an ethical code there, which I’m attempting to break.” When Ben Frost asks him why, Mosse responds that the ethical code is “out of date. I think it needs refreshing. There’s no red blood cells left when it comes to representing the Congo . . . When people are offended, there’s something genuinely at stake. And I’m not talking about shock factor here.”[17] But to whom is the image of the eastern Congo that Richard Mosse creates beautiful? Would this man’s family have thought that this photo was beautiful? Is The Enclave an assertion of a Congolese beauty that, even if scuffed-up, still shines? Or is The Enclave, instead of challenging Western representations of the Congo as forsaken and hideous, a problematic inversion of them: instead of a writer like Joseph Conrad profiting from making Africa ugly, the artist benefits from making Africa a place of haunted beauty? Is it possible that The Enclave can be all these things to a degree, as well as genuinely concerned with raising awareness of the conflict in the D.R.C., the way that the posing young soldier might have evinced an uneasy coexistence of jocularity and threatening machismo?

The Enclave is beautiful and hideous, fraught with potential problems and self-redeeming qualities alike. It raises many questions and provides few, if any, answers. It does contribute to an understanding of what tendencies and yearnings Western representations of the Congo exhibit, however. Heart of Darkness hyperbolized the Congo’s nature and dehumanized Africans in order to assert a lack of civilization. Tintin in the Congo replicated this trope in a way that might have served as justification for colonialism to some Belgians. The Enclave hyperbolizes Congolese nature, but does that reflect a desire for a Romantic sublimity? Or does it convert the D.R.C. into safari grounds for the Western photographer taking pictures of its inhabitants, and who has the option of leaving whenever he wishes? Or does emphasizing Congolese nature pay respect to a majesty and grandeur that genuinely resides in the D.R.C.’s landscape? Tintin and the Congo and The Enclave also showcase the different ways that the West often represents the Congo’s inhabitants. The former was racist and dehumanized the Congolese. But The Enclave? Does it attach a human face to a problem that remains abstract for the West? Is its subject those who are returning the West’s intent stare, and if so, does The Enclave give the Congolese a platform with which they can express themselves to the West? Or is that idea a condescending and inaccurate insinuation that the Congolese can’t make themselves heard? Furthermore, do the lack of interviews with Congolese people, and an editing process that likely filtered out lots of mundane footage in favour of visually and emotionally compelling shots, make The Enclave a voyeuristic montage of anonymous Congolese people? The ethical implications of The Enclave remain open to further discussion and analysis. However, like Tintin in the Congo, it shows itself to be yet another Western representation of the Congo whose ambivalence and ambiguity say more about the West’s convoluted feelings towards the Congo, than they reflect the Congo itself.

To hear what some Congolese artists have to say about their history and the conflict in their country, check out the following links:

Tout Ceci Ne Vous Rendra Pas Le Congo is a rap song by Congolese performer Baloji.

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Sammy Baloji is an artist who creates stark, surreal photomontages that juxtapose the past and present in the D.R.C.’s mining cities.

http://www.prixpictet.com/portfolios/earth-shortlist/sammy-baloji/

Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s novel Tram 83 uses the setting of a Congolese mining town to grapple with the issues affecting the country today. An interview with him appears on Africa is a Country.

http://africasacountry.com/2015/11/sex-beer-and-ndombolo-an-interview-with-fiston-mwanza-mujila/

Musicians Boddhi Satva and Kaysha collaborate on Ancestral Soul and African House tracks:

Know any other works that challenge trite representations of the Congo? Post them in the comments!

Acknowledgments:

I’d like to thank Beemnet Alemayehu. Apart from showing me The Enclave and therefore making this paper possible, he refined my analysis of it with lots of shrewd insight, encouragement, and resources. His help is much appreciated.

[1] Hergé, Tintin in the Congo, 83, 94.

[2] Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Almayer’s Folly; The Lagoon, (New York: Dell Pub., 1960), 67.

[3] Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 69.

[4] Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 60.

[5] Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” Research in African Literatures 9 no. 1, (1978): 13.

[6] Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 45.

[7] Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 71.

[8] Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 71.

[9] Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 69.

[10] Francis Jennings, “Virgin Land and Savage People,” American Quarterly, (1971): 521, accessed February 13, 2016, doi: 10.2307/2711704

[11] Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire?” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, (2004): 171, accessed February 13, 2016, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8306.2004.09401009.x

[12] “Richard Mosse: The Impossible Image,” Vimeo, accessed February 12 2016, https://vimeo.com/67115692.

[13] “Richard Mosse: The impossible Image.”

[14] Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” 3.

[15] “Richard Mosse: The Impossible Image.”

[16] “Richard Mosse: The Impossible Image.”

[17] “Ben Frost Speaks to Richard Mosse—‘Your Work Will Be Distilled into a Plugin in Photoshop,’” Electronic Beats, accessed February 12 2016, http://www.electronicbeats.net/ben-frost-speaks-to-richard-mosse-your-work-will-be-distilled-into-a-plugin-in-photoshop/.