Lawyer calls for ban on 'racist' Tintin comic book

Specialist hate crime officers have logged the sale of the comic book - Tintin In The Congo - in a high-street bookshop as an alleged "racist incident".

Lawyer David Enright complained about the "highly offensive" portrayal of black people in the book, which was on sale in a branch of the Borders chain.

Mr Enright, 40, told the Standard he was appalled when he and his black wife and two young children found it in the shop in their home town of St Albans.

In a letter of complaint to Borders he wrote: "Before passing the book to my wife and two boys (aged two-and-a-half and seven) I opened the book. I was utterly astonished and aghast to see page after page of representations of black African people as baboons or monkeys, bowing before a white teenager and speaking like retarded baboons."

He later took his concerns to Hertfordshire police, who are now considering whether to act on his complaint.

Mr Enright, a partner in London law firm Howe & Co, has won the support of the Commission for Racial Equality and is demanding that Borders stop selling the 77-year-old story.

Borders has refused, arguing that it "cannot and will not act as moral judge and jury in deciding what material we sell to our customers".

It has agreed to remove the book from its children's section and stock it instead in its adult "graphics" section, but a CRE spokeswoman said that did not go far enough.

She said: "A hundred years ago it was common to see negative stereotypes of black people. Books contained images of 'savages', and some white people considered black people to be intellectually and socially inferior. Most people would assume that those days are behind us and that we now live in a more accepting society.

"Yet here we are in 2007 with a high-street bookshop selling a book that contains imagery and words of hideous racial prejudice. It's high time that they reconsidered their decision and removed this from their shelves."

The book was written in 1930 and has always been controversial because of its crude depictions of black Africans. It was Belgian cartoonist Hergé's second Tintin book and he later went on to describe it as a "youthful sin".

Despite being published in 35 languages, Tintin In The Congo has only been available in English since 2005, and even then with a warning about the treatment of its subject material.

Tintin expert Michael Farr said the book, which has also been criticised for its depiction of cruelty to animals, had to be seen in its historical context.

Mr Farr, who is writing a biography of Hergé, said: "This book has been happily appearing in every other European country and in Africa since 1946. It was only in Britain where, perhaps because of the colonial past, we felt we had to tread more carefully on the subject and held back.

"It is hardly outrageous. It's good fun actually and portrays black Africans very sympathetically. Hergé was very, very far from being a racist. He was actually a champion of minority groups."

He claimed it was one of the most popular Tintin books in Africa.

A spokesman for Hertfordshire police said the complaint was being treated as a "racist incident" but said no criminal action could be pursued because the offence was not directed at an individual.