I lived in Brussels until I was nine. One of my abiding memories is of a school trip to the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, a vast, grandiose building built by King Leopold II, who also ordered the construction of the equally outsized Palais de Justice, which became Hitler’s favourite building.

Leopold II was in effect given the Congo to use as his personal fiefdom by a conference of the European powers in 1885; even by the colonial standards of the time, his disastrous rule in the Congo was so unbelievably cruel, bloody and wicked that the Belgian government took it back in 1908 (to say things didn’t improve much would be a masterpiece of understatement).

Anyway, my memory of the museum, which feels like false memory syndrome because it now sounds horrible to the point of insanity, concerns a black human leg used as an umbrella stand.

The museum, which contains extraordinary treasures looted from central Africa, and the Congo specifically, is reinventing itself (in 2007!) and undergoing renovation. It will reemerge, sanitised, in 2010, minus the commentary explaining that Africans were ape-like, primitive folks – savages, really, and not even noble ones – and the Belgians their warm-hearted, paternalistic benefactors.

The point of this is that it took Belgium an exceptionally long time to accept the fact that its colonial past was so appalling and mired in butchery that it horrified other colonial powers. It apologised to the people of the Congo in 2002 for its role in the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but not for its support of Joseph Mobutu’s dictatorship – or for, well, the past 150 years.

When I was a child you never saw black people in Brussels, although there were many refugees from the Congo. Like the Moroccans in another part of town – and like medieval Jews – they lived in a ghetto from which they didn’t venture. If you were an educated middle-class person, it was considered acceptable to speak in a comedy African accent to illustrate some joke or other.

When one of my Belgian cousins married a woman from Uganda a decade or so later – the family gave the impression they would have preferred him to express an interest in paedophilia – the death of a relative the couple had argued with was solemnly blamed on long-distance “juju” and “voodoo” by my family, who are generally perfectly nice people – bankers and lawyers, well travelled, well read, not stupid. This was the 1980s.

On a trip to Brussels a fortnight ago I was glad to see that attitudes have changed dramatically though I still wondered about the provenance of African treasures in the antique shops.

I’m sharing this to give the furore over Tintin in the Congo, by the Belgian artist Hergé, a bit of context. The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) has backed a call for the book to be banned. French and Belgian children can often quote from it – I know I can, as with Asterix – but it was published in colour in Britain only in 2005, with a foreword explaining the colonial attitudes prevalent at the time it was written, in 1931. The book was redrawn in 1964 when Hergé removed several references to the Congo being a Belgian colony.

In later years he spoke of his regret at aspects of the book, explaining that he was echoing the ignorant views of the time. His views changed; by 1936 The Blue Lotus had a strong antiimperialist message.

Last week David Enright, a human rights lawyer whose wife is black, came across the book in Borders and was outraged by what the CRE described as “imagery and words of hideous racial prejudice, where the ‘savage natives’ look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles . . . It beggars belief that in this day and age Borders would think it acceptable to sell and display it”.

Borders will now put the book in its adult comics section; Waterstone’s said it would consider a similar move; WH Smith sells it on its website, with a sticker recommending readers be 16 or over. Not good enough, says the CRE: the only acceptable place for the book is in a museum, “with a big sign saying old-fashioned, racist claptrap”.

I don’t agree. The museum in question would have to be awfully big with its basic assumption being that people were so stupid that they had to be protected from the content of cartoons written 80 years ago – that is, protected from history on the grounds that some of it wasn’t nice. It would contain a great deal of Hergé’s oeuvre – yellow Chinese people, bright red Indians, sinister Soviets, creepy Incas, fat, hysterical women who never stop singing, thick people, absent-minded professors, caricatured sailors.

You’d have to make room for all the Asterix books, where the languid, effete British stop fighting in order to have a cup of hot water; where the anally retentive Swiss are constantly cleaning, winding up cuckoo clocks and making fondue; where the Belgians are pugilistic, food-obsessed oafs.

But why stop there? You could chuck in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, lots of Kipling, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell on class grounds; practically every novel written in the past 200 years on feminist ones; The Tiger Who Came to Tea because the mother is a domestic drudge, a victim of paternalism, a pathetic role model and bourgeois to boot. In fact you could make a huge bonfire and burn every book that exists on the basis that you can guarantee someone will find it offensive.

Or you could be intelligent, examine context, and use it as a springboard to explain racism/colonialism/history/ misogyny/the class system to your children. Just because something is unpalatable doesn’t mean it has to be erased. Erasing it only serves to make it outré and desirable - sales have since rocketed by 3,800% on Amazon.

Tintin in the Congo is a product of its time. It correctly represents attitudes that were prevalent in 1931 (and, in Belgium, well beyond it). Nobody is denying those attitudes were grotesquely offensive, or that literature – and art in general – doesn’t contain an embarrassment of material that causes any brown or black-skinned adult to cringe, or any brown or black-skinned child to feel miserably sad. But that doesn’t mean the sensible thing to do with such material is to wipe it out and pretend it never existed.

Books stand as testament to the errors and horrors of history. They are vitally important. The CRE’s reaction is misguided.

Times Recommends

• It’s not just about Iraq, it’s about Blair’s style
• You can’t rank hospitals like football teams
• Minarets are not an essential part of Islam