A Congolese accountant now living in Belgium has brought a lawsuit against the bande dessinée or cartoon book Tintin au Congo published in the early 1930s on the grounds that it portrays racial sterotypes.
One can understand the sensitivity given that the Belgians treated their colony of the Congo until 1960 in a way that even Stalin would have admired, but the issue becomes the old one of whether freedom of speech should be allowed. If books like Beloved, Hard Candy, Mein Kampf, the Koran or even Huckleberry Finn which have provocative content are allowed, where do you draw the line? The Nazis banned books by Jewish authors and books which took a contrary line to theirs (although interestingly Mein Kampf was also banned in France during WW2 on the grounds that the French had best not know what the Führer had written about them).
We agree with the Americans that freedom of speech should be protected.
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