News Desk

The harvest season is a moment of festivity in Medu, a Hausa farming community in the Gagarawa Local Government Area of Jigawa State, North West Nigeria. After residents gather crops and fill their granaries, women set aside a special day to celebrate Asure, an age-old traditional feast whose name means “enjoyment”.

Ramma Hassan, a mother of five—two boys and three girls—believes Asure is both a source of joy and a challenge. From her farming proceeds, she saved diligently for months in preparation for the annual celebration, ensuring her children were not left out.

“We sew clothes for our children, we buy new hijabs and shoes, and we cook rice and stew with chicken,” she told HumAngle. “If we don’t do this, our children will look different when every other child is looking good and feasting.”

Unlike other communal events in the village, where men often take centre stage, Asure is distinctly women-led. It is held after the hibiscus harvest, locally known as zobo—the last crop to leave the farms each season. Women are often invited by farmers to harvest the hibiscus, either for cash payment or in exchange for a share of the produce. They sell it and use the proceeds to prepare for the feast. Once the harvest is complete, brides-to-be and other young women agree on a date for the celebration, which is then announced across the community by a town crier.

Ramma spent over ₦100,000 preparing three of her daughters for Asure last year. Those with more financial capacity spent more, while others spent less, depending on their savings.

“I didn’t save much, as the produce I got was not highly priced; that is why I spent so little,” she said. “The more we save, the more we spend, especially when the prices of foodstuffs soar in the market.”

However, Ramma told HumAngle that in a world that often forgets to look their way, the hibiscus harvest allows them to step into the light and take responsibilities often reserved for men.

“Asure to us is not just about cooking; it is about giving our best and showing that our labour can sustain the rhythm of our village life. In those moments, despite the financial burden it comes with, every mother like myself is usually excited that we are not left behind by tradition; we are the tradition itself,” she emphasised.

Food and fellowship

The recent feast was held on December 29, 2025, and HumAngle attended. On the eve of Asure, the village hummed with excitement. Women moved from house to house, laying out fabrics and showing other women the new clothes they had bought, while others prepared ingredients for delicacies. Children chattered endlessly, eager to wear their new hijabs, shoes, and shirts.

“I am very excited to enjoy my portion of rice and chicken and to put on my new clothes,” said Aisha Arma, a nine-year-old.

The spirit of festivity abounded, reflected in the beams in the women’s eyes as they watched their sons and daughters rejoice over their new clothes and flip-flops. For many children, sleep came slowly that night, as their minds were already in celebration. 

At dawn, the village stirred to life. Smoke rose from kitchens lit by sorghum canes, as women set up their cooking spaces, pots clanging and local spices filling the air.

Men joined in, assisting their wives or mothers with slaughtering chickens or goats, after which women and children defeathered them before turning them over for the stew. The pounding of the mortar and pestle resounded across the village, mingling with laughter and the chatter of children running through the dusty streets.

By noon, the anticipation reached its peak. Children were served food on metal plates with colourful designs and, balancing their meals on their heads, they headed to open fields and school grounds, where friends sat together under trees to feast. 

The sight was striking, with boys and girls in colourful attire, plates balanced on the ground, sharing bites and stories. The feast was marked by an abundance of dishes which were rarely on their daily menu. 

What is Asure?

The significance of Asure lies in its emphasis on women’s agency. 

In a society where economic decisions are often dominated by men, this festival allows women to showcase their financial resilience and generosity.

Asure dates back over 150 years, according to Malam Dauda Muhammad Medu, the 59-year-old leader of Matarama, a group that supports cultural decisions in the community. Despite its age, little is known about Asure’s origin. Every older person HumAngle spoke with said they simply grew up experiencing the festival, with no clear account of how or why it started. This makes Asure a tradition preserved largely through practice rather than written or oral history.

“This festival has been here before us,” Dauda told HumAngle. “We met our grandparents and parents, celebrating it.” The festival is held in Medu and other neighbouring communities. 

“Traditionally, Asure is celebrated after harvest, when farmers have brought food home. Women fix the date, and the day is marked by meals reserved for special occasions. Goats are slaughtered in some households, but at the very least, a chicken must be prepared for every child. Even households without children must slaughter one,” he added. 

Dauda revealed that on the day of the feast, eating tuwo or similar staple food is prohibited. Instead, rice, macaroni, spaghetti, or other festive meals are prepared for children and adults alike, who change into colourful clothes to gather in open spaces, sharing food and joy.

“This is purely cultural; that is why women take charge. It is our own way of celebrating International Women’s Day,” he said. “Aside from Asure, however, men are responsible for providing everything, including during other festive seasons like Eid.”

The local leader recalled that Asure was once solely about feasting, but innovations have emerged. During the festivity, fiancés in the community compete to impress their future wives by purchasing expensive clothes, hijabs, wrappers, and other valuables. The culturally-rooted feast transformed into a display of love and wealth.

“As of two years ago, a man could spend nothing less than ₦150,000 for his bride-to-be outside the wedding expenses,” Dauda said. “Such spending sometimes strained relationships, even leading to breakups when expectations were not met.”

To address this concern amid the country’s economic hardship, the men came together and consulted the Matarama group and the village head.  A collective decision was made to return the feast to its roots. 

The new stipulation for the Asure feast was that grooms would provide groceries, two measures of rice, two or three chickens, two bottles of cooking oil, and stew ingredients. Dauda reiterated that clothing and accessories would remain the responsibility of mothers.

“Anyone who went beyond these stipulations would face punishment,” he noted.

Resilience despite hardship

Despite these adjustments, the current economic reality has added another layer of struggle to the Asure feast, which is not optional, especially for mothers like Fatima Arma, who fear being subjected to gossip for failing to provide for their children.

Fatima told HumAngle the joy of preparing for the celebration is often overshadowed by worry about how much money must be spent, as prices of rice, chicken, and even simple items like cooking oil have risen, forcing women like her to stretch their savings further than before.

After the feast, hardship often follows as the savings of an entire year vanish in a single day of celebration. Fatima laughed as she responded to the question of what comes after Asure, saying, “Poverty and hardship”.

“Despite the hardship, the feast cannot be abandoned, especially in a community like ours where traditions are deeply rooted; failing to provide for children during Asure is seen as neglect. We fear the whispers and judgments of others. That is why the pressure to keep up with expectations weighs heavily, even when resources are scarce,” she lamented.

Dauda added that since women are at the forefront of sustaining the tradition, the local cultural group will ensure subsequent adjustments to sustain inclusivity in the community while bearing in mind economic realities.

“Asure carries deep cultural meaning to us even though it is modest in scale compared to urban festivals. More importantly, it underscores the resilience of our women in rural communities who, despite limited resources, create abundance through sacrifice and planning,” he said.

Jennette McCurdy’s phone could not be silenced.

After the release of her 2022 memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” the actress-turned-author received an unending barrage of messages and calls from friends, family, distant acquaintances, people she’d crossed paths with one time when she was 12 years old.

“I heard from everybody I’ve ever met. Everybody came out of the woodwork,” McCurdy said. While most of the messages were positive, she added, “I have changed my phone number a few times since then. I like to keep my inner circle pretty close now.”

Her memoir was a raw, unflinching look at her childhood spent tethered to an abusive mother, her personal battles with eating disorders and alcohol, her tumultuous teenage years as a Nickelodeon star on the sitcoms “iCarly” and “Sam & Cat” and her recalibration in the wake of her mother’s death from cancer when McCurdy was 21.

Its readership went far beyond McCurdy’s phone contacts. “I’m Glad My Mom Died” was a bona fide phenomenon. It sold more than 3 million copies and spent more than 80 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. And it’s currently in the process of being adapted into an Apple TV+ series starring Jennifer Aniston as McCurdy’s mother.

Now, McCurdy, who is 33, is attempting to tell a new story with the January release of her debut novel “Half His Age.” The insular, visceral tale follows Waldo, a teenage girl in Alaska who has a sexual relationship with her middle-aged, married English teacher.

If some readers were aghast at the title of McCurdy’s memoir or its contents, they’ll almost certainly balk at “Half His Age,” which is a thorny exploration of power, lust, shame and rage, written in McCurdy’s now-signature wry style. The book’s cover features a close-up photograph of a young woman (not McCurdy) sucking her middle finger, and the sex scenes within are unvarnished, uncomfortable and plentiful.

“I’m never writing something that’s intentionally provocative, and I’m certainly never writing anything for shock value,” McCurdy said. “I really try to write for truth, and I can’t help it if that’s shocking. I can’t help it if that’s noisy or alarming. In fact, if it is those things, that’s probably an indication that there is some truth there and a conversation that’s needed to be had.”

When we met for our interview at a Pasadena restaurant in December, McCurdy looked almost identical to when I’d interviewed her there in 2022, before the release of her memoir — dark blond, tousled curls atop a petite frame and a broad smile. But a granular shift seems to have occurred. Nervous laughter has been replaced by a calmer confidence. Her eyes sparkle a little brighter.

The success of McCurdy’s memoir cemented her status as a writer, a title she prized far above “former child actor” or “TV star.” Authors she’d long admired, like Maria Semple and Tom Perrotta, now read and praise her writing. McCurdy even spent Thanksgiving with Semple last year.

“It’s this sense of belonging that I’ve always craved and never quite felt,” she said. “All through my 20s I thought, ‘Well, I’m just losing my tribe. I don’t know where my people are.’ I have found my people through writing in the past three years.”

It’s been a long time coming. After moving away from acting — a career that had been thrust upon her by her mother at just 6 years old — McCurdy began to furiously devote herself to writing in the mid-2010s. At first, she immersed herself in a variety of classes around L.A. She tried sketch writing, late-night TV writing, spec writing, but she quickly learned she didn’t actually want to write sketches or late-night monologues. Instead, she started to focus on longer-form storytelling via essays, her memoir, novels and screenplays.

At least six days a week for the last decade, McCurdy said, she’s spent her waking hours scribbling on a laptop inside her Pasadena home, rotating from her desk to the kitchen counter to the couch to the dining table to the veranda and back again.

“I sort of write until I’m tired. Sometimes that’s 4 p.m. and sometimes that’s 8 p.m.,” she said. “This year, specifically, I’ve pulled the longest days of my life. I had many days that were until 2 in the morning. It was really, really intense.”

“Half His Age” first began percolating when McCurdy was 24, riding a bullet train on a solo trip in Japan. She’d never written a book at that point, but the idea of a novel with a 17-year-old protagonist involved in an age-gap relationship cemented itself in the back of her brain. Years later, after the release of her memoir, she felt compelled to finally see it through.

“It forced itself upon me. You know, when authors say words like, ‘There was no other choice than to write this thing,’ I always thought it sounded a little pretentious,” she said. “Now, I completely know what it means. Waldo, this protagonist, her voice — I was waking up in the middle of the night thinking of this character.”

Although McCurdy said she considers herself an emotional writer, some elements of “Half His Age” required more exacting research. Setting a story in a public high school when she herself had only been homeschooled and tutored on set, for example, was a challenge.

“I was literally looking up, ‘Do they still have lockers in high school? What is a typical layout of a high school?’” she said.

Elsewhere, she imbued the story with elements of familiarity: Waldo has similar unruly curls to McCurdy’s; Waldo’s best friend is Mormon, the religion in which McCurdy was raised; and Waldo lives in Anchorage, where McCurdy’s partner of nine years is from, and where McCurdy said she has spent many months.

She also gave Waldo a complicated, absentee mother figure who leaves Waldo to shoulder the responsibilities of the household with her paychecks from a part-time job at a Victoria’s Secret. (On a different scale, McCurdy was the breadwinner for her own family by the time she was a teenager.)

“I think I’ll always write mother-daughter dynamics, and really any family dynamics, in a complicated, messy way. I’ve tried to write other kinds of dynamics, and my body will freeze up,” she said. “If I’m trying to write a loving, supportive, validating, parental figure, that’s not my experience. I don’t know how to begin to write that.”

“I really try to write for truth, and I can’t help it if that’s shocking. I can’t help it if that’s noisy or alarming,” said author Jennette McCurdy.

(Victoria Stevens)

But beyond those details, McCurdy has a deep connection to the book’s central storyline: McCurdy’s first serious relationship, which she detailed in her memoir, occurred when she was a naïve 18-year-old with an “iCarly” crew member who was in his mid-30s.

“There’s certainly overlap,” she said. “There’s certainly influence there. Writing, for me, is a means of finding closure where maybe there wasn’t in my own life. It’s a means of finding meaning and empowerment in places where maybe I didn’t feel it so much. It’s a way of exploring things that I maybe haven’t fully processed myself.”

She added, “I kept thinking, ‘Why is this coming through? Why is this the book that I’m writing?’ Several drafts in, I realized, ‘Oh, it’s because I have a lot of unprocessed rage about this.’ Of course, it’s a piece of fiction, and there are plenty of deviations, but, ultimately, I have a really personal connection to it, coming from that place myself.”

Rage is something she expects many female readers to feel as they follow Waldo’s journey in “Half His Age.”

“We’re taught to be polite and nice and make everybody around us feel comfortable and take the high road,” McCurdy said, her voice catching. “My experience of rage is that the more I have connected with it, the more it has led me on an effective life path, the more it has led me to make choices that I had been needing to make for a long time.”

Those choices have resulted in McCurdy not only becoming a prominent author, but a person fully in control of their career for the first time. She is currently working on her next book, and she has already written a script for a film adaptation of “Half His Age,” which she will also direct “if all the pieces fall into place,” she said.

The upcoming series adaptation of “I’m Glad My Mom Died” was similarly something McCurdy was only comfortable with if she could stay at the helm. She and Ari Katcher will serve as co-showrunners. She wrote all 10 episodes, she said, and will direct multiple episodes, as well.

“I am not interested in my stories being taken into somebody else’s hands,” she said. “That would be offensive to me.”

McCurdy will not appear on screen, however, and she said it’s too early to discuss who will play younger versions of herself. Meanwhile, Aniston’s connection to the material — the veteran actress has said that she and McCurdy “had very similar moms” — was key to casting her in the matriarch role.

“She does relate a lot to the material,” McCurdy said of Aniston. “It would be a disservice to the heart and soul of this book, and a disservice to the deep connection millions of people have with it, for anybody to be a part of it for any other reason. I’m deeply protective of it.”

As we finished up our mid-afternoon meal — a hodgepodge of spicy tuna bites and asparagus fries paired with guava and berry mocktails — McCurdy reflected on the agency she is finally able to take.

“I didn’t feel that I had a voice with, really, any aspect of my life growing up. I felt kind of voiceless,” she said. “Writing was where I found my voice, and I think, as a result of that, found my power.”

Spencer is an L.A.-based culture writer and reporter. Her nonfiction book, “Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel’s Tween Empire,” is out now.

A Seoul court on Monday posthumously acquitted a man executed 50 years ago for allegedly attempting to rebuild an underground pro-North Korea organization in a retrial of the case.

The Seoul Eastern District Court found the late Kang Eul-seong not guilty on charges of violating the National Security Act, citing insufficient evidence.

Kang, a civilian military worker, was executed in 1976 after his arrest and torture by military counterintelligence authorities for allegedly attempting to reconstruct the Unification Revolutionary Party on alleged orders from North Korea in 1974.

The underground organization had been uncovered by South Korea’s spy agency under then President Park Chung-hee’s administration in 1968 and dismantled.

The court said it could not conclude that Kang praised or sympathized with anti-state activities for reading a paper published in North Korea.

“(Our) hearts feel heavy. Although a past wrong has been corrected, irreversible damage has already been done and the fact that it is too late leaves a sense of helplessness,” the court said. “We made the verdict in this case with a sense of contrition as the judiciary did not fulfill the expectations of the people.”

“As a member of the judiciary that made an error, I once again bow my head to apologize to the bereaved family members.”

Prosecutors had sought Kang’s acquittal in the retrial, saying that procedural truth had not been kept in the original trial. They will not seek an appeal.

The Seoul Eastern District Prosecutors Office apologized to the defendant and his bereaved family, vowing to remain faithful to its core duties.

Kang’s family expressed their intent to receive an apology not only from the judiciary but the defense ministry as well.

“The defense ministry arbitrarily dealt with the case, and we spoke of how we should receive an apology from the defense ministry,” Jin-ok, Kang’s eldest daughter told Yonhap News Agency by phone.

“We talked about how we should try for it, if it is possible,” she said. “We have fought for the past 53 years and we don’t think it will happen instantly.”

It marked the latest case surrounding the underground organization, in which the defendant was acquitted.

Four other people accused of attempting to rebuild the pro-North Korea group have been acquitted posthumously in retrials.

Copyright (c) Yonhap News Agency prohibits its content from being redistributed or reprinted without consent, and forbids the content from being learned and used by artificial intelligence systems.

John Barrowman, best known for playing Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who and Torchwood, has shared some devastating news with his fans

Emotional John Barrowman has shared heartbreaking news with fans.

The 58-year-old Doctor Who actor has taken to social media to announce the death of his beloved dog Captain Jack Harkness.

Posting a video on X of himself in tears next to his partner Scott Gill, holding his beloved pooch in his arms, he penned: “Captain Jack Harkness our beloved Jack Russell has gone.

“He waited until i came home and he died peacefully in his dada’s arms within an hour of my return with @scottmale, Dixie and Tito around him.

“He was a good boy, a loyal friend and our Jackamo for 18 years. We are very sad but grateful he died of old age and did not suffer. . #love #dog #companion #friend #loyalty.”

In the video, John explained that he was aware that Captain Jack was “on his way out”

The former Dancing on Ice judge has since been inundated with supportive messages from his followers, with one writing: “I feel your pain. Just awful. So sorry.”

Another added: “In tears here and just wanted to show my support at such a difficult time. I’ve been in this same place and I know… rest peacefully bestest boy. You are loved indeed.”

A third said: “I am so sorry for your loss my deepest condolences to you and your family.” A fourth posted: “I’m so sorry I lost my dog a few months ago and it’s still tough. I’m glad you got to be there and hold him one last time, Sending love.”

John is a huge dog lover, known for his own rescue dogs like Captain Jack, Charlie and Harris and Doctor Who fans will know that John played Captain Jack Harkness in the hit BBC show and spin-off series Torchwood.

The character first appeared in the 2005 Doctor Who episode The Empty Child and subsequently featured in the remaining episodes of the series as a companion to the Doctor.

Subsequent to this, Jack became the central character in the adult-themed Torchwood, which aired from 2006 to 2011.

John reprised the role for appearances in Doctor Who in its third, fourth, and twelfth series, as well as specials The End of Time, and Revolution of the Daleks.