Lesson 3 The Power of Helping Others
A Korean Chief in Nigeria
There is a Korean man who became the chief of a Nigerian tribe for making huge contributions to Nigeria’s agriculture and economy.
Here is his story.
Dr. Hahn is an agriculturist who specialized in plant breeding.
Growing up right after the Korean war, he knew what it was like to be hungry, and he wanted to help people in need.
In 1971, he was given two opportunities: work for Cambridge University or for the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria.
On his way to Cambridge for a job interview, he first stopped in Nigeria.
There, he saw the country had been destroyed by a civil war.
More than 2 million people had died, and more than half a million people were starving.
Dr. Hahn wanted to rescue Nigerians from hunger.
So, he persuaded his family and moved to Nigeria.
When Dr. Hahn got there, he learned that the staple food in Nigeria was a plant called cassava.
Unfortunately, cassava was defenseless against viral and bacterial diseases, so it did not yield much crop.
Knowing this, he decided to develop stronger cassava varieties with higher yields.
However, Dr. Hahn faced a problem: there was not much information available about cassava.
Cassava was rarely studied or developed because it was not a cash crop.
To make matters worse, he had never seen or eaten cassava before.
While studying African cassava, Dr. Hahn found out that the Europeans who colonized Brazil had first brought cassava into Africa.
He immediately flew to Brazil to study the original cassava.
There, he learned about it and went back to Nigeria with Brazilian cassava seeds.
Then, Dr. Hahn traveled to every corner of Nigeria and collected different types of local cassava to see if they were good at fighting diseases, but they weren’t.
Fortunately, he found a plant that was similar to cassava but resistant to diseases.
He started crossing this plant with the Brazilian cassava.
After five years of hard work, Dr. Hahn finally succeeded in developing new varieties of cassava.
They yielded much more than the local ones and could survive diseases.
Another obstacle
Another obstacle Dr. Hahn faced was distributing the new varieties.
Local farmers would not listen to a foreigner.
To overcome this problem, Dr. Hahn visited markets, churches, and schools and gave out the new varieties to Nigerian people for free.
He went from one house to the next to let farmers know the superiority of these new varieties.
Sometimes he planted them in the middle of the cassava field without telling the farmers.
His colleagues were concerned that the farmers might be angry to find different cassava in their fields.
However, Dr. Hahn insisted that the farmers would think that it was a gift from God.
He was right. The farmers soon realized the superiority of the new varieties, and more and more farmers started to cultivate them.
Thanks to the new cassava, fewer people were starving.
In fact, they could even make more money by selling the remaining cassava.
Eventually, Nigeria became the country that produced the greatest amount of cassava in the world.
In 1983, the Yoruba, a major tribe of Nigeria, honored Dr. Hahn as a chief with the title “Seriki Agbe” or “the King of Farmers.”
In addition to cassava, Dr. Hahn developed other major foods, including yam, sweet potato, and banana.
Soon, other African countries asked for his help.
Dr. Hahn traveled to these countries to teach local farmers and scholars how to grow these new varieties.
He spent 23 years developing and distributing the new cassava varieties to the whole continent.
Although he left Nigeria in 1994, he is still remembered as one of the greatest scientists who fought against starvation in Africa.
Dr. Hahn once said, “If you have faith that what you do will benefit humanity, I believe that you must sacrifice yourself.
Even if I were to go back to the past, I would still do the same thing.”
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