ABSTRACT
In their study, The Congo: Plunder and Resistance , David Renton, David Seddon, and Leo Zeilig (2007, 2) acknowledge from the very start that when writing about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1 two wellknown classics stand in the way: Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) and Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998). This interplay of violent national histories and its representations is also visible in Belgium’s museum landscape. Among the extensive collection of African artifacts in Tervuren’s Royal Museum for Central Africa, a Penguin Modern Classics edition of Conrad’s novella is prominently displayed. 2 The Belgian Comic Strip Center in Brussels features a display case with Hergé’s second volume of The Adventures of Tintin, Tintin in the Congo (1930-31), for which Hergé “researched visual materials” at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Assouline 2009, 27). While the original publication of Tintin in the Congo was uncontroversial, Hergé was later accused of racism, to which he replied that it “was a period when it was the most natural thing for a country to have colonies” (Assouline 2009, 28). According to Pierre Assouline (2009, 29), Hergé not only displayed a “conformity with the dominant mores,” but also “his talent was an anesthetic” and “disarmed all challenges to the established order.” Assouline (2009, 29) further quotes Tintin’s praise by the newspaper L’Essort colonial et maritime , which reminded its readers that “true propaganda begins in the schools: ‘You will laugh till tears come to your eyes because the Congo presented by Hergé will make you forget the other one, the one you saw.’ ” Hochschild (1998, 280) has described the latter, which is King Leopold II’s brutal regime of the private colony, “État Indépendant du Congo” / “Congo Free State” (1877-1908), which he founded and exploited, as “the most murderous part of the European Scramble for Africa” with an estimated population loss of 10 million people.
