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Your historical background on colonization added a lot of necessary depth. I agree with your points as well. I had the book as a child (with the red band and warning) and was aware of how unacceptable the depictions were. This was in South Africa, where white people have quite the history of racism to say the least. I think it all comes down to how we raise our children to understand these things, and Congo shouldn't "disappear" but it should definitely be packaged in that collector's edition way, standing out from the others. It's not casual reading. It's also interesting to see the extent to which Hergé was bombarded with propaganda, and how far he came after that, even if his more well-intended depictions of African people in later books were far from ideal. For me it's much more interesting to see how an author evolved from an ultra-racist indoctrination than to ignore his early work altogether. Muganga's also a pretty interesting villain, it's just a shame he's a horrific stereotype. As for the animal cruelty, you've got to wonder how those elephants in Cigars would have felt knowing what Tintin did to their relatives not long before! It seems that Tintin, like Hergé, changed for the better.
10:30 - In another documentary on the legacy of the Central African "Empire", a poster of Tintin in the Congo is visible in a Bangui memorabilia shop besides an old portrait of Bokassa (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-hnl7wyn4gZ0.html). So perhaps it still has a following in that region today. Also, by the 70s anti-colonial rhetoric had become associated with brutal kleptocrats like Mobutu so perhaps such quaint stories had a nostalgic charm, like 80's action films.
