Lobasha, A Psychic Boy Detective December 10, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Had something stolen? A close friend has been murdered? Or has there been a kidnapping in the family? Help unfortunately is not at hand. The FBI are busy with the Patriot Act, the A Team are lost in the Los Angeles Underground and Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin is regrettably fictional. However, do not despair for the Lobasha is on the other end of the phone. The Lobasha was a psychic boy detective, with a serious drug habit, called out to solve unsolvable crimes in the Empire of Abyssinia, c. 1900. (Beach feels a series of airport detective novels coming on.) This report dates to 1903 and came from a man in the know Alfred Ilg (obit 1916), a Swiss engineer and long-time special advisor to the emperor Menelik II: he was actually, for several years, the Foreign Minister of the Empire! His reflections on the Lobasha were first printed by the Neue Zuricher Zeitung and from this Lobasha’s fame made its way around the world. (Perhaps the airport novels should have the Lobasha hired out to solve mysteries in other countries? The Lobasha in the Congo; The Lobasha in America; The Lobasha in the Land of the Soviets.) There follow three of the Lobasha’s most celebrated cases with (invented) titles from one of the doubtless bastardised versions of the Zeitung article from further downstream.
The Mysterious Case of the Flame and the Runner
On the occasion of an intentional incendiary fire at Addis Abeba, the Lobasha was called in. He was made to drink a cup of milk in which a little green powder had been dissolved, after which a pipe of tobacco was given him to smoke, in which a black powder had been put. The child passed into the hypnotic state and after a few minutes got up quickly and started towards Harrar. He ran incessantly for sixteen hours. The professional runners, who followed him, were tired out. Near Harrar, the lobasha suddenly quitted the road, entered a field, and touched the hand of a Galla at work there; the Galla confessed his crime.
The Case of the Remorseful Murderer
One case was personally examined by the Emperor Menelik and by the engineer Ilg: it was that of an assassination, followed by theft, committed near Addis-Abeba. The lobasha was brought to the place where the crime was perpetrated, and was thrown into a peculiar psychic state. He ran round and round the spot for some time, then be went to Addis-Abeba, entered a church and kissed it; he went to another church, and kissed it also. On reaching a spot where there was water – water breaks the enchantment, according to the belief of the country – the child awoke. He was hypnotised again, and then started off once more; he went round several dwellings; on reaching the door of one of these, he stopped and awoke again. The proprietor of the dwelling was absent; he was, however, arrested; at first he denied his crime, but in his house were found some of the objects which belonged to the victim, and he was compelled to confess. When summoned before Menelik, the latter enquired what he had done after committing his crime. It was found that his actions corresponded with those of the lobasha. He confessed that, seized with remorse, he had visited two churches in succession and had kissed them.
The Case of the Empress’s Missing Jewels
[The Emperor] Menelik, wishing to have further proof of the faculties of Lobasha took possession of some jewels belonging to the Empress. The lobasha was brought; he ran first to the Empress’s apartments, then to those of Menelik, then into other rooms, and finally threw himself on Menelik’s bed.
‘M. Ilg attempts no explanation of this marvellous gift.’ And nor should we…
Anything else on the Lobasha: seems to be nothing in anthropological works, drbeachcombing At gmail dot com Was this an office or an individual? i.e. was Lobasha something like Dalai Lama or just ‘Fred’?
Bruce T, 30 Dec 2017: It seems to me either James Bruce or Richard Burton mentioned the Lobasha, but I’m not 100% on either. I have heard of him before, though. Arthur Rimbaud, died 1891, spent the last 10 years of his life in Harar and was a very close friend of Haile Selassie’s father. As Arthur liked to sample “the fruits of the forest” and desert, and wherever else, he would have been damned interested in what was up with a cranked up kid, and where he could get a few samples in the adult dose? Two, he was affiliated with the Ethiopian govt. and represented European coffee and arms co. in the region. Arthur stopped writing for literary purposes in 1875, but the man was a writer none the less. He must have left quite a paper trail w/ the companies and govt. agencies he represented? Arthur is the right man, in the right place, in the right Ethiopian circles to have seen the Lobasha in action. Burton would have been doing his wandering around the region about a half century before Ilg, a decade or so before Rimbaud, and Bruce a century before Burton and Rimbaud. The green inhaled substance was likely Khat, a mild stimulant. Combined w/ the nicotine alone from a very finely ground snuff being blown up his nose, a powerful neurotoxin and no wonder the kid was up and going? Ethiopia is the home of coffee, both it’s domestication and use as a stimulant drink. I’ve got to think the “drink” was chock full of caffeine along with other psychoactive plants that make our modern day “5 Hour Energy Shots” look like something you’d give a teething infant to help it go to sleep? Whatever it was, it sounds like the kid was ripped out of his gourd. What I find interesting is the reaction of the culprits when Lobasha shows up. The accused denies it a couple of times and then meekly confesses. It strikes me as more a morality play in the way it works out than it does an investigation. Of course, the Lobasha represents a very powerful man. Perhaps the accused knows his fate is sealed when the hopped up brat comes knocking on the door and the protests of innocence before confession are to save face in the accused circles? It strikes me more as an office perhaps used to control the actions of the Ethiopian aristocracy? Sending a nearby adult peer loyal to the Emperor out to arrest a known scofflaw from a noble family, could cause local and regional conflicts among the aristocracy. Using a whacked out brainwashed kid sent by the Emperor sidesteps that issue nicely. Not a lot on him, I’ve ran into the same story about him in the Chicago Tribune from 1903. If he is a ritual personage, he may be much like the living Goddesses of Nepal who lose their status when they hit puberty? If so there should be other mentions of the official “Lobasha” in diplomats, traders, and Ethiopian records. Axum and Kush have been well known of and traveled to by people from the Med. basin for 3000 years. Cushite and and other Afro-Asiatic speakers are spread widely from the greater Sudan, to the Med, and from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. I know there are vestigial pre-Islamic rituals centered around dancing boy mediums on the verge of puberty in the Rif of Morocco and the mountains of northern Algeria among the Berbers, but the boy there seems to be an agent of chaos to be tamed by the women, not an agent of state justice. However fired up on “kif”, a combination of strong local cannabis mixed with a heavy dose of strong local tobacco, the boys have been known to dance themselves to death over the three day period following Eid.-al-Fitr. Perhaps there is something closer to the Lobasha further south, where agricultural states sprung up across the expanse of the Sudan in the 1st Millennium B.C. influenced both by Nubia and Ethiopia and central authority was stronger? The horse and later the camel made two way contact from Meroe to the Senegal via the savannah south of the Sahara very possible if you were so inclined both before and after this period.
