Trying to oerp.create records, getting cryptic error messages

I'm trying to follow the procedures given in the docs under Tutorials > Execute Queries https://pythonhosted.org/OERPLib/tutorials.html#execute-queries.

I would like to create a user, so I've tried to do this:

import oerplib
oerp = oerplib.OERP('localhost',protocol='xmlrpc', port=8069)
u = oerp.login('admin','***','my_db')
wb = oerp.create('res.user', {'name':'Foo Bar', 'login':'foob'})

and the response is:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
RPCError Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-23-db916ec9957e> in <module>()
----> 1 wb = oerp.create('res.user', {'name':'Wolfgang Boehmer', 'login':'wolfgangb'})

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/oerplib/oerp.pyc in create(self, model, vals, context)
    427 :raise: :class:`oerplib.error.RPCError`
    428 """
--> 429 return self.execute(model, 'create', vals, context)
    430
    431 def read(self, model, ids, fields=None, context=None):

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/oerplib/oerp.pyc in execute(self, model, method, *args)
    248 model, method, *args)
    249 except rpc.error.ConnectorError as exc:
--> 250 raise error.RPCError(exc.message, exc.oerp_traceback)
    251
    252 def execute_kw(self, model, method, args=None, kwargs=None):

RPCError: 2

I'm not really sure what RPCError 2 is supposed to mean. Is it possible to get more detailed error messages, like, am I missing fields? Are the values of fields not valid?

Some context for my question:

I'm new to OpenERP and I'm beginning to play around with openerp-client-lib and oerplib. I'm trying to import some data from a flat csv file, which contains information about contacts, partners and companies. Each row represents a contact, but based on the contents of the row it could also be that the contact is a partner, and is associated with a company. Contacts can also be associated with a sales person.

When importing this CSV in the web interface, I get validation errors that "No matching record found for name 'Foo Bar' in field 'Salesperson' at row 2. It does not seem possible to configure the import process to create a related record if no matching records exist, which is why I started to explore the idea of importing these records in a script.