A missing Texas woman found living with the self-proclaimed leaders of a lost “African” tribe in a Scottish forest insists she is there by her own free will, despite her family’s fears she is lost to the sect forever.
Kaura Taylor was recently found living in the woods with the group after vanishing from her home three months ago, leaving relatives distraught.
“It is very stressful, and difficult. It breaks our heart. We’re overly concerned about Kaura, but she doesn’t think anyone is concerned about her,” Taylor’s aunt Teri Allen told The Independent.
In a message posted to Facebook after 21-year-old Taylor, mother to a one-year-old child who she took with her to Scotland, said that she was not missing lashed out at reports she “disappeared.”
“I’m very happy with my King and Queen, I was never missing, I fled a very abusive, toxic family,” Taylor wrote, following up with a video message telling U.K. authorities to leave her alone in the woods in Jedburgh, 40 miles south of Edinburgh. She added that she is “an adult, not a helpless child.”
However, Allen on Thursday pushed back stridently against those assertions, describing her niece’s younger years as “very sheltered and protected.”
She said Taylor “was brought up in church, but not their religion. Not this thing that they got going. It’s a bunch of hogwash.”
Speaking to The Independent from her Dallas-area home, Allen said Taylor kept it “totally hidden from the family” when she began communicating in 2023 with so-called Kingdom of Kubala leader King Atehene, a former opera singer and PR agent from Ghana whose real name is Kofi Offeh, and his wife Jean Gasho, who now goes by Queen Nandi.
Queen Nandi did not respond to a request for comment. An email seeking comment from King Atehene bounced back as undeliverable.
The Kingdom of Kubala claims to be a lost Hebrew tribe that aims to retake the land they say was expropriated when Queen Elizabeth I expelled native black Jacobites from England in the 1590s.
The trio in Jedburgh hope to add to their numbers by bringing other supposedly lost tribes back to their purported ancestral homeland.
Allen said she thinks Taylor, who now answers to Asnat of Atehene, handmaiden of Queen Nandi, discovered the group online through a high school classmate.
She then cut herself off very suddenly from loved ones, refusing to attend family gatherings and stopped celebrating holidays altogether, Allen recalled.
At the time, Taylor was living with her aunt Vandora Skinner, Allen’s sister.
In a separate interview with The Independent, Skinner said: “She went missing in May. But she wasn’t missing at all, she left to go live with these people.”
Taylor, who lived with Skinner during her teenage years, was, according to her aunt, a “very very unruly” teen who could be “very disrespectful,” but was always given a lot of latitude at home.
“She lived in a four-bedroom house, with her own room, and maybe I shouldn’t have been as light on her as I was,” Skinner said. “I allowed her boyfriends to come over, but maybe I shouldn’t have. But I did get her to graduate high school. ”
Taylor tried to get her then-boyfriend to relocate to the Scottish forest with her, but he was turned off by King Atehene and Queen Nandi’s “ungodly rituals” and decided against it, according to Skinner. The 21-year-old then ended the relationship and in May headed to Scotland with her then-eight-month-old daughter, whose father was no longer in the picture, Skinner said.
About two days later, Skinner said Taylor texted her, saying, “We had to get out and explore a little bit.” When Skinner asked where she was, she didn’t get a response.
“She said she would have to call me when she got connected to wifi, but then I never heard from her again,” Skinner said.
Skinner did, however, hear from Taylor’s best friend, who spoke to her every day. So when the friend started asking Skinner about Taylor, she said she knew something wasn’t quite right.
The friend told Skinner that Taylor had talked about going to live with “these people,” but that she didn’t know anything further.
“And I said, ‘What people?’ And they said they didn’t know, so I started to call around,” Skinner went on. “I called her ex-boyfriend and that’s when he told me about the [Kingdom’s] Facebook page and that she said she was going to the U.K. I looked up the Facebook page and sure enough, there she was.”
Skinner immediately told Allen, who passed the news along to their other sister, Taylor’s mother.
“She thought it was photoshopped, but it turned out to be true,” Skinner said.
Skinner then began searching Facebook for more information, and saw that Atehene and Nandi had previously set up an almost identical living situation with another young American woman.
What really upset Skinner, she continued, was spotting Taylor in a video posted to the social network saying that while she wasn’t actually married to King Atehene, she still considered herself to be his second wife.
“Now she’s talking about, she’s married to this man and he can have as many wives as he wants?” Skinner said in disbelief.
Skinner eventually connected with a Jedburgh-area resident in the comments section beneath a news article about the group. The couple had fought a losing battle against eviction from their patch of woods.
The Jedburgh resident suggested Skinner contact Scottish police, and gave her a number, so she reported Taylor and her daughter, who turned a year old in June, missing.
Taylor is believed to have flown to the U.K. on May 25 on a six-month tourist visa that would mean her time there is due to end in November, after then her aunts hope she’ll be forced to leave the country and return home to Texas.
