Belgium's cartoon hero Tintin is being dragged before the courts by a Congolese man amidst accusations of racism and colonialist propaganda. Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo is clamouring to get Tintin in the Congo, a comic strip charting the boy reporter's adventures in Africa, to be pulled from the shelves in Belgium. The verdict in the legal case is expected on 5 May.

'The blacks are portrayed as stupid children who can't add up two and two and who have to kneel before the whites,' says Mbutu Mondondo, who lives in Belgium. 'Such books should no longer be on sale in the 21st century.'

Big Juju Man

The comic book, drawn in 1931, shows Tintin sporting a pith helmet over his trademark blond quiff and attired in colonial khakis as he ventures forth among native Africans. In one scene, he teaches Congolese schoolchildren maths, in another, a black woman bows before him, calling him the 'great' white master and 'big juju man'.

Tintin's creator Hergé later described this early adventure as a 'mistake from my youth' which he said was the product of his bourgeois upbringing. He purged it of all references of "Belgian Congo" and of its overt depictions of colonial rule when he re-drew it for a colour edition in the 1940's. He also removed a sequence in which Tintin uses dynamite to blow up an elephant, though he had to fend off persistent accusations of racism. Hergé, himself a national treasure, argued that it was meant to be read as a testimony of a by-gone age, written long before the abuses of King Leopold's rule over what was renamed Zaire upon independence in 1971 and is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Letter to the King

Mbutu Mondondo said earlier complaints had lain dormant for years. 'I don't think investigators wanted to do anything about it,' he said in an interview in February. 'Hergé and the Moulinsart Foundation [which owns the rights] are like deities in this country, you can't go near them.'

Mbutu Mondondo, a student who is currently unemployed, has vowed to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary. He also wrote a letter to King Albert II earlier this year to highlight the issue. 'This comic strip is viewed by most Congolese as a bad memory... from an era when we were seen as inferior beings,' he wrote. He added that it was his mission to have the volume banned before the King's visit to Kinshasa in July to mark the country's 50th anniversary of independence.

The verdict was expected last Wednesday, but it has been delayed until 5 May while Moulinsart studies the case.

Warnings

One of Mbutu Mondondo's lawyers told Belgian media that he could not understand why the Dutch and French-language editions did not carry the same warnings about the book's racist elements as the English version, introduced after a complaint to the Commission for Racial Equality in Britain three years ago. Since then, the book has been largely removed from the children's section to the adult graphic novels in bookshops, with similar rules in force in the US.