Inside the African tribe community living in a Scottish woods – fighting off evictions & local ‘vigilantes'
The Kingdom of Kubala claims they have settled here to reclaim land stolen from their ancestors in the Highlands 400 years ago.
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Queen Nandi, King' Atehene and their 'handmaid' Asnat created the Kingdom of Kubala on a countryside hill in Jedburgh, but were evicted by the council.
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Scottish Sun
a day ago
- Scottish Sun
Inside the African tribe community living in a Scottish woods – fighting off evictions & local ‘vigilantes'
A GROUP claiming to be an African tribe with its own King and Queen have set up in a Borders wood - with a vow to expand over Scotland. The Kingdom of Kubala claims they have settled here to reclaim land stolen from their ancestors in the Highlands 400 years ago. 8 Queen Nandi, King' Atehene and their 'handmaid' Asnat created the Kingdom of Kubala on a countryside hill in Jedburgh, but were evicted by the council.
The Herald Scotland
2 days ago
- The Herald Scotland
Tributes to a ‘force of nature' who fell in love with far-flung Malawi
Died: May 31, 2025. BETTY CUNNINGHAM OBE, who has died aged 79, was more than once described as 'a force of nature'. This is a quality I discovered for myself in late 2007 when I accompanied her to Malawi. The landlocked south-eastern African country and its people exerted a special fascination for Betty, and a foundation bearing her name had been constructing nurseries, a clinic and other much-needed facilities in Kaponda, an impoverished village an hour's drive from the capital, Lilongwe. We made the 17-hour-long flight to Lilongwe via Amsterdam, Nigeria and Zambia. When we landed, I was weary and craved nothing more than a stiff drink, something to eat, and an early night. Betty, however, was raring to go, and, sitting in the front passenger seat of a 4x4, she set to work and began a long succession of meetings with local officials. Betty, who at that time was the deputy provost of East Renfrewshire Council, was on her fifth visit to the country that year. Kaponda was an eye-opening experience. The villagers, back then, lived in clay-built, thatched-roof huts that were tiny, dank and unlit. Families slept on makeshift mats on the ground. Electricity and sanitation were unknown. I kept seeing Betty, and her distinctive hairdo, everywhere: talking to village elders, cradling infants and toddlers, and even, at one stage, admonishing a man who tried to take more than his fair share of donated clothes. The arrival of a lorry bearing boxes of blankets, duvets, clothes, teddy bears and football strips was a cause of communal celebration. 'We have such a thirst now for providing, because the need here is so great,' Betty said. 'We want to be part of providing for the orphans and the kids with families, to help them see a future that is more than just the things they see every day. I always get emotional coming here. I've got over the feelings of pity I had at first, and I know what is needed to give them hope and a real future. I've come to regard them as almost my own family.' Read more: In the days that followed, she would return with rice, flour and cooking oil, bicycles and sweets for the children. She was tireless, and seemed never to need a rest from her endeavours. Betty made countless visits to Malawi over the ensuing years, taking a substantial number of East Renfrewshire people with her, and when she received an OBE from the late Queen in the New Year's Honours of 2011, it was for services to East Renfrewshire and Malawi. East Renfrewshire Council said in a statement that the Betty Cunningham International Trust, as it was now known, had transformed the lives of people living in Kaponda. Elizabeth Wood was born on May 19, 1946 to William and Elizabeth Wood, of Barrhead. She was educated at the local St John's Primary and St John's High. She was working at the Wm Grant whisky bond, as a chargehand and a union representative when, towards the end of the 1990s she was asked by Walter McCready, a well-known local figure and a former provost of Barrhead and Renfrew District Council, to consider standing for election in his ward as he was due to retire. She agreed and went on to serve the Barrhead, Liboside and Uplawmoor ward in a steadfast manner for 26 years, working tirelessly on behalf of her constituents. As provost between 2003 and 2007 she enjoyed a high profile. West of Scotland MSP Paul O'Kane said she 'worked hard to make everyone feel like they were a VIP when the provost came to officiate at an event; this often included a run in the 'provost's motor''. She also raised thousands of pounds for charities. In 2007, then prime minister Tony Blair visited the area for a meet-the-people engagement: six tables, eight people apiece, all from a cross-section of East Renfrewshire society. At table two, Betty slipped a copy of the Barrhead News under Blair's nose. 'He's a local boy,' she said, pointing to a picture of Alex McLeish, the then manager of the Scotland team. 'My dear old auntie used to live in this constituency', the premier responded. A letter from Mr Blair was read aloud at Betty's funeral by Jim Murphy, the former Scottish secretary of state and MP for East Renfrewshire. East Renfrewshire council leader Owen O'Donnell paid his tribute, saying that social justice and Labour values were in Betty's DNA. Declining to take no as an answer to her ambitious plans for the area, he added, she would raise matters directly with Mr Blair and then first minister Jack McConnell. Mr O'Kane said Betty 'was Barrhead through and through. She loved the bones and the stones of the place, and was immensely proud to represent it on the council for more than two decades'. In a Holyrood motion commemorating her passing, he described her as 'a force of nature most often to be found on her mobile phone dealing with constituents' problems'. East Renfrewshire Provost Mary Montague said: 'Strong in character and often in her language, she was formidable in fighting for the best interests of Barrhead and East Renfrewshire. She was a determined champion for a just cause and, for anyone who found themselves in a difficult situation and asked Betty for help, they got it'. Tributes were also paid by Kirsten Oswald, a former SNP MP for East Renfrewshire, and by Jackson Carlaw, Conservative MSP for Eastwood, who, in a post on X, said: 'While always full of mischief East Renfrewshire Labour councillor & former Provost Betty Cunningham ... was respected for her lifetime of service to & pride in her Barrhead home town. A true character'. Last year Betty was presented with the Lifetime Legend award at the Local Government Information Unit awards. Daughter Helen said: 'She was an amazing person who lived for others. When she was on the council she loved meeting all sorts of people, from school kids to pensioners' groups, and she was brilliant when it came to helping people in need. She fell in love with the people of Malawi, too. I'm proud of everything she achieved'.
Spectator
5 days ago
- Spectator
The spiritual journey of St Augustine
When I lived in south London, my Algerian barber used to tell me that he came from Souk Ahras, 'the home town of Augustine'. I found it strange to hear a forbidding doctor of the early church described as a local boy made good, but Catherine Conybeare shows me that I should not have done. Algerians have remembered what the Church has often overlooked: that Augustine's thinking owes everything to his birth in 354 in what was then Roman North Africa. Although five million of his words survive, they come to us from the hands of medieval copyists who were more interested in setting out his doctrines than in recording his life. They cut up his sermons and letters, removing irrelevant or cryptic local allusions. Conybeare resurrects Augustine the African by sifting this heap of words for surviving references to people and places. Although wryly describing herself as a philologist, she is also a perceptive traveller, enlivening her textual work with vivid descriptions of Augustine's cities in their prime and as they survive today. These literary devices are hardly new. They have defined the study of late antiquity ever since the 1960s, when Peter Brown first composed a satisfying biography of Augustine of Hippo by reading his theology against the grain. They also bring diminishing returns. Augustine was too intent on spiritual realities to notice the material and urban world around him much. Even the most evocative descriptions of temples or amphitheatres he must have seen may not bring him much closer. Nor are his local observations always revelatory. It is true that his description of humans as caught in God's olive press must have resonated with African farmers who lived for the olive harvest, but the example seems as slight as an English vicar describing the Christian life as a difficult wicket or a game of two halves. The test of Conybeare's book is not whether it generates new information but whether it refreshens and deepens appreciation of Augustine's thought. Here it succeeds brilliantly, convincingly relating his greatest achievements to his sense of being caught between Rome and North Africa. Although he had viewed his education in Thagaste (now Souk Ahras) and Carthage as just a means of escape to Rome, the city disappointed him. It struck him as London might an ambitious young writer today – filled with politicians trading off past imperial glories and a public that prized cultural polish but refused to pay for it. He preferred Milan, the seat of the powerful bishop Ambrose. But even here he ended up mainly hanging around with people he knew from home. Conybeare neatly points out that what initiated the conversion to Christianity, described in his Confessions, was a conversation with his hometown friend Alypius and an African acquaintance about the impressive piety of Antony – an African monk. Augustine was always conscious of an inferiority when dealing with Romans, who made fun not of his race but of his tongue: he tended to mispronounce Latin. When they turned really nasty, they mocked him as a 'Punic pamphleteer' who gabbled in the native language of his country. When he returned to Africa, though, becoming a priest, then a bishop, in the coastal town of Hippo (now Annaba), he was impatient with its narrow mental horizons. His new largeness of view explains the cryptic and violent controversy he waged for decades against the Donatists, who ran a rival church in Africa. He had come back home as a proud member of a universal institution, writing that 'we are the good fragrance of Christ in every place'. Yet the Donatists said that a church's rites were only powerful if enacted by priests whose purity they had judged themselves – a principle that Augustine mocked as African self-satisfaction run mad. Caught between two places, he now had no real home. When posh refugees from Rome turned up in North Africa after Alaric sacked the city in 410, he began The City of God to quieten their unsettling whingeing about its collapse. Augustine did not care about the looting or destruction of buildings – a city was its people. But as his giant work slowly progressed, he shifted gear, coming to argue that all Christians should consider themselves peregrini. We now often render that word as the quaint 'pilgrims', but it began as a technical term for legalised aliens. Augustine's life on the outskirts of a disintegrating empire taught him that we are all citizens of nowhere. Italy ultimately claimed Augustine. Centuries after his death in 430, his body ended up in Pavia, under a pompous monument that makes no reference to Africa. Perhaps he would not have minded. The lesson of this book is also his teaching: even if our origins explain us, they should not limit who we become.
