Sonntagsführung: Black Comics - Vom Kolonialismus zum Black Panther

In the organizer's words:

Sunday guided tour through the current exhibition.
Free admission, participation in the guided tour: €3
No registration necessary

Black Comics
From colonialism to the Black Panther
November 16, 2024 - April 27, 2025

Exhibition curated by Dr. Alexander Braun
Western democracies, especially Germany, have begun to deal intensively with their colonial history. This has revealed painful abysses of robbery, abduction, enslavement and genocide, which were concealed for far too long by the fiction of adventurousness and the supposed development of civilization. The reality was different: inhumane and cruel.

And what does the comic have to say about this? It is difficult to expect that the cultural products of racist societies would not present a similar picture. One negative example is Hergé's "Tintin in the Congo" from 1930, in which the blond Belgian reporter alongside Catholic missionaries brings education and virtue to the "stupid" Africans.
But only nine years later, Jijé did better and gave the European comic strip a black boy as the title hero ("Blondin et Cirage") in the middle of the Nazi occupation of Belgium.

What's more, despite its colonial agenda, "Tintin in the Congo" became a bestseller in the Congo itself and is still one of the most popular comic titles in Africa today. The album became the initial spark for an African comic culture of its own: around 50 percent of comic artists on the entire continent come from the Congo. The example shows: There is little to be gained here with crude clichés and quick condemnations. The topic is very complex and full of ambivalences.

Price information:

3€