Isn't it? Not sure about today but I bought a copy maybe 10 years ago after never having seen it for sale in living memory before that. It did come with some wrapping around the front that said it was of its time though.
I got a new French copy more recently than that as well (can't remember when exactly but it may have been in the last two years).
The coloured editions seem to be the same in both languages except for the rhino encounter (plus the English edition having a content warning before page 1). I believe the changed rhino encounter was initially done for the Dutch translation many years ago.
My friend is a big fan of Tintin and has a lot of really nice hand carved large wooden figurines of the characters and vehicles from the series.
I would normally think these figurines would be made for tourists but I don't think there is much of a tourist trade in the DRC. These figurines would sell for a lot of money in the USA or Europe.
> When Hergé published this comic book, he was only 23 years old and wrote it as part of government-led initiative to encourage Belgians to take up commissions in Congo ... Later on his life, Hergé would say: "For the Congo as with Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, the fact was that I was fed on the prejudices of the bourgeois society in which I moved ... It was 1930. I only knew things about these countries that people said at the time: 'Africans were great big children ... Thank goodness for them that we were there!' Etc. And I portrayed these Africans according to such criteria, in the purely paternalistic spirit which existed then in Belgium".
See: Tintin In The Congo, by Hergé (Georges Remi) - https://archive.org/details/tintin-in-the-congo-herge-george...