1. T. Lobsang Rampa
T. Lobsang Rampa's books are very popular in West Africa. His books fill the bookshops. But when I started to write this book I had to search the bookshops in London before I could find one of his books. Why are they so popular in Africa? What kind of books are they?
The sort of questions we might want to ask are: Who is T. Lobsang Rampa? Has he been to Tibet? Is he the soul of a Tibetan Lama transferred to an Englishman? Those readers unused to the world of books and information available in the modern world may wonder whether his books are reliable and truthful.

The short answer is that the T. Lobsang Rampa books were written by Cyril Henry Hoskin, who died in Calgary, Canada in 1981.

Fiction or non-fiction?
It is possible that most of his readers believe his books are non-fiction. However experts on books and on history are convinced that they do not describe real places or events. You should remember the definition of fiction: fiction consists of material produced by and from the imagination of the writer. Non-fiction consists of attempts to describe the world outside the mind of the writer.

What category can we put the Rampa books into? They are written apparently in the form of an autobiography of a person called Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. (To an English-speaking person, this name sounds very foreign and, perhaps, Tibetan). Many of the earliest novels in English were written in the form of fictionalised autobiography. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, one of the most famous of the early novels, is undoubtedly a work of fiction but is in the form of the autobiography of the main character. Another famous novel of the eighteenth century was Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. This too is the autobiography of the main character.

Both these books are in the form of travel accounts, but no-one is deceived. Everyone knows they are fiction. For example, people at the time knew that the authors had not gone on the long sea voyages they wrote about. Swift was a clergyman who had never been away from the British Isles. Defoe was a journalist and government agent who had also not travelled. Of course both had read accounts of other people's real travels.

What about Rampa? When he died in February 1981 it was revealed that his real name was Cyril Henry Hoskins and that he had been living in Alberta, Canada for the past twenty years. He was born in or near Plymouth, England. When he died he was 70 years of age. He was a former plumber and clerk. There is no evidence that he visited Tibet, for all of his life a place very difficult to reach.

It is quite common for writers to use a different name when they publish books. It is called a pen-name or pseudonym. We can say therefore that Rampa was Hoskin's pen-name. Sometimes writers don't want their friends to know that they have written certain books. For example a professor at Oxford university has written several books of detective fiction. For these he used a pen-name. If his fellow professors had known that he wrote books like that they might not have taken him seriously in his main professional work.

Mr. Hoskins may have considered that books set partly in Tibet would sound more authentic if he didn't use an obviously English-sounding name like Hoskin. This is not to say that Rampa is a genuine Tibetan name. But it does sound foreign. He wrote his first book just after he became unemployed from a job in a correspondence college in England. He never needed another salaried job.

Are his books really about Tibet? More accurately: are they about the real Tibet? If it could be shown that the events in the books, or events like them, really happened, and if it could be shown that the real country of Tibet is like the Tibet described in the books we should have to classify them as non-fiction and could use them as evidence about Tibet. However, if scholars who have studied Tibet - and actually been there - say that Tibet is nothing like Rampa's country then we should have to classify the books as fiction.

In fact scholars who have studied Tibet are agreed that it is nothing like the country described by "Rampa". They are sure therefore that the books are fiction and made up from the imagination of Hoskin and not from real experiences in Tibet.

Useful reading

Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe

Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal (Enriched Classics Series)

As It Was