Sandwiched between an industrial estate and a car park, in a small beech wood on the outskirts of Jedburgh, is the Kingdom of Kubala.

It is neither fancy, nor full of riches. Just a messy sprawl of two tents, a trio of camping chairs, a smoky fire and, hidden behind a stripy beach shelter, a bucket with a loo seat attached.

Towels and bulging bin bags hang from branches. Empty water bottles are piled around the trunk of a tree. Dirty Tupperware pots and bottles of Irn-Bru and Nando’s chilli sauce are scattered on a camping table.

In the middle of it all, the self-styled ‘King Atehene’ sits in crushed velvet splendour. Staff in hand, legs spread, tummy jutting and smirking as his ‘Queen Nandi’ curtseys and asks: ‘Would my Lord like his biscuit?’ and ‘Asnat’, his handmaiden and ‘bonded woman’, fans him with what looks like a long feather duster.

It is quite a scene, what with his face all smeared with ash from the fire and the cowrie shells on his feathered headdress gleaming in the dappled sunshine. And the ladies’ tribal face paint and beads.

It would all be quite fun, if they were a bunch of children playing dress up in the woods. Or even – as some people assumed – a bizarre woodland offshoot of the Edinburgh Fringe.

Indeed, when Scotland’s Lost Tribe first hit the headlines last month and started posting videos on social media about how they live on free (three-way) love and ‘benefits from Jehovah’, most people dismissed them as harmless eccentrics.

But the more we learn about them, the darker and more alarming their ‘Kingdom’ and their disconnect from mainstream life appears.

Particularly to those who knew the King – aka Kofi Offeh, 36, a former Ghanaian opera singer and entrepreneur – and the Queen – Jean Gasho, 43 – in their former life, with their seven children in a flat above a fast food outlet called MunchBox on a busy road in Stockton-on-Tees.

Neighbours still remember the house daubed with crude signs in red paint that read ‘House of Fire’, and ‘Your children shall be dashed to pieces’. And the pair shouting nightmarish warnings about the end of days for non-believers.

But, most of all, they remember social services swooping one in night in 2023 and removing all seven children, arresting the pair on charges of child cruelty and holding them on remand in prison for six months. Charges that were later dropped.

Meanwhile, the Texan family of Asnat – aka 21-year-old Kaura Taylor, a former chess champion – are beside themselves with worry.

Melba Whitehead, 45, claims her daughter and her ten-month-old baby went missing back in May, but that the first the family knew of her whereabouts was when she popped up on social media, cooking by a campfire, in full tribal gear in a wood in Jedburgh. 

They insist her baby has been removed by social services. And that Taylor, who turned down a scholarship to study law at university, has been groomed online, brainwashed by the King and Queen and flown over to Scotland to become, in her own words, the King’s ‘inferior mistress’.

‘This cult is crazy. They pose a threat to everyone around them,’ said Melba in a recent interview.

‘Kaura is very vulnerable. She’s not capable of taking care of herself. She is in a trance. We are heartbroken. She was just babbling about how she’d found her heaven.’

Meanwhile, Taylor has insisted – again via social media and in her tribal gear – that she’s completely happy. That she is an adult who makes her own decisions.

What a very murky mess – and no wonder the residents of Jedburgh are desperate for their Lost Tribe to move on.

So to try to make some sense of it all, I pay a visit. Starting with the obligatory stop at the local Co-op, because the King won’t talk to anyone who arrives in his Kingdom empty-handed.

‘What gift did you bring today?’ are his opening words. ‘Please bring them to me, Asnat.’

Well versed, she immediately takes my shopping – ‘It is my job to present them to the Lord’ – and kneels to lay it at his bare feet so he can briefly inspect the contents, jam doughnuts, coffee, Irn- Bru, before they are squirrelled away. ‘Now we will begin.’

But where? I don’t think I have ever had so many burning questions. What happened to all their children? Where is Taylor’s baby? Has she been brainwashed? Is she already pregnant again, as her mother seems to believe? Are any of them in danger?

But as both women seem to require the King’s permission to discuss anything potentially controversial, we start gently. Why Jedburgh? It’s a perfectly nice town, with a ruined abbey and a lot of coffee shops, but there isn’t even a station.

‘The Creator decided. He deemed it. He guides us,’ says the King and explains that, as their Kingdom expands with new disciples, this will be the epicentre. 

He then spends the next five minutes telling me how he’s ‘the Holy Grail with a direct bloodline from the one they call Jesus Christ’, how the women must give up make-up, fake eyelashes and embrace their natural hair and, in the future, will make sacrificial offerings of live lambs to the Creator.

Talking to the King is hard work. He’s forever pausing to throw up his arms and roll back his eyes to show the whites – apparently, to channel the divine but more likely just for effect – as he drones on and on. About Jehovah, and his epiphany a few years back after a particularly difficult time in his life, and how he won’t call Taylor his ‘wife’ but treats her like one.

But most annoying is that he sits above us all on his camping chair throne while we are all cross legged on a piece of dirty grey carpet at his feet.

The women, however, are easier. And extremely beautiful.

They tell me that they love each other and have never felt such peace and happiness. That Asnat is responsible for doing all the housework and cleaning and fetching and carrying and washing and sweeping and fanning, and should never, ever, sit in either the King or Queen’s chairs. And that they love living in the woods with the deer and squirrels. Oh yes, and that they’re very happy sharing their Lord’s affections.

‘There’s a hierarchy, a structure, rules,’ explains Asnat. ‘I am an inferior mistress, a bonded woman, because this what I was created to do. We don’t step on each other’s toes. We are not jealous. This is freedom. We have stepped into purpose, into our destiny.’

And she does look happy. Extraordinarily, weirdly, soporifically happy as we listen to the beech trees whispering in the wind. In fact, exactly like someone who has been brainwashed.

Particularly when – grabbing a moment when she is out of earshot from her royal bosses – I ask about her family’s concerns for her welfare.

‘This is my family. I am not missing. I am happy and I am writing a book about it, in scripture,’ she says with a wide, peaceful smile. But when I ask how she and they met – her mother claims she was introduced to them online in 2023 by a former partner and the father of her missing baby – she clams up. ‘That is sacred information,’ she says. ‘Too precious – we cannot share that.’

Perhaps she answered an advert like the one Gasho posted on social media back in 2019. In it she advertised for a second wife for her husband, ‘to celebrate the end of 400 years of slavery’ and pointed out that applicants, aged 25 to 35, were invited to send a CV and a fee (of £500 if a single mother or £350 if childless), but that virgins were free.

But, again, she will not say, because it is ‘sacred’. Though rumour has it, she is not the first woman the pair have persuaded to join the Kingdom of Kubala and her family claim she was vulnerable, having lost her confidence in lockdown and become distant and difficult.

So I try again with the baby. Was there ever a baby? Has she been taken into care?

And again, a great smiling fudge of a non-answer. ‘There has been much speculation about whether I do or will have children. All I can say is that every child of mine in the near future, is the child of the Queen and King,’ she says.

Which could allude to swirling rumours that she is already pregnant with King’s baby – for the record, she’s moving fairly gingerly but she is barefoot in a wood and there’s no sign of a bump.

Next I try my luck with the Queen, aka Gasho, the daughter of a wealthy Zimbabwean businessman who trained as a nurse and was divorced with four children when she fell in love with Offeh’s ‘magnificent voice’ in 2014.

They were not always religious fanatics. Old social media posts show them in a smart yellow sitting room – he in a crisp shirt, she in make-up and a lovely dress – looking happy and carefree.

But sadly things went downhill and their belief in their divine heritage appears to have coincided with mental health problems.

In November 2021, Offeh was detained at Roseberry Park Hospital near Middlesbrough for psychiatric treatment. And in the same year, mired in grief after her beloved father died, Gasho live-streamed herself making artwork, covered in paint, surrounded by screaming children.

It all came to a head in November 2023, when social services took all seven children into care. They have not seen them since.

‘The whole kingdom was gutted. Gone,’ she says, suddenly looking very bleak, before rallying. ‘But I connect with them in my dreams and I do not cry. Because we have faith in the Kingdom of Kubala and that the children will return.’

Offeh, however, refuses to address any aspect of the past. ‘When life is old its old. When it’s new, it’s new. You found a new family. You don’t look back. It’s gone,’ he says. It is all very alarming. Not least because this is not just a bit of summer madness.

Offeh and Gasho have been camping out since early spring, when they first moved to Jedburgh with no mattresses, just hard Scottish soil to lie on. Goodness knows what they’ll do come winter – they don’t even have proper coats.

‘Breaking into the wild comes with so much fulfilment, but it is not very comfortable,’ says Gasho.

Initially, they were on a council-owned field on the other side of town, from which they all made daily pilgrimages to sit on the bench outside the Co-op to access the Wi-Fi.

‘But it was no good. We were harassed when we were washing in the stream, we had no privacy,’ she says.

Then came eviction notices and on August 7 their entire camp, ‘everything we owned’, was burned to the ground as they were in town checking their emails.

‘Some people see light, others see dark,’ says Offeh, with his eyes rolled back again.

But then, he says, the Creator stepped in. Or, more accurately, a couple of local good Samaritans who took pity on them and provided new tents, camping chairs and bedding. ‘We have no money. No savings. Nothing,’ he says.

But now, every day, more stuff arrives from people who have watched their mad videos. Airbeds. Egyptian cotton pillows. Firelighters. Fever Tree tonic water. All of which they credit to Jehovah.

Much to the fury of some residents, as more alarming details about the trio emerge.

‘Some idiot people have been buying them all sorts,’ says Carol, 64. ‘Encouraging them. It’s nothing but the bloody best for them.’

A furious grey-haired woman on a bench adds: ‘We don’t want them near our grandchildren. They’re clearly mad.’

The Co-op has now removed its handy Wi-Fi bench.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Borders Council confirms it has provided advice and information about alternative housing options and other support and will continue to monitor the situation closely. And Taylor’s family continue to worry.

Back in their little wood, I ask if any of them have ever woken on the hard, cold ground and wondered if they could possibly be mistaken – that maybe there is no Kingdom and that, perhaps, they are just horribly confused?

The ladies, again, just smile silently and only the King replies.

‘It is impossible. I know the truth,’ he says. ‘We’re building a kingdom from scratch and every time we’ve had a challenge it gives us more strength.’