Dr. Sang-Ki Hahn, an agricultural specialist
A great Korean admirer of Africa publishes
an anthology of African proverbs
“Who said the African culture is primitive? The modern people in the East and West who eagerly want to be in communion with both God and nature need to look the inside of the African people.” So stated Adjunct Professor Dr. Sang-Ki Hahn of the University of Georgia in an interview with The Korea Post in Seoul on Nov. 9 2013.
An authority on agriculture and environment, Dr. Hahn said that the African people know of no severance from civilization, solitude or estrangement. The African people, he said, love dancing and society with others, and intuitively seek coalescence and union.
Dr. Hahn was born in Seoul in 1933, graduated from Seoul National University and its graduate school and from the graduate school of the State University of Michigan. Then he worked as professor emeritus at Cornell University in the United States.
Dr. Hahn spent more than 20 years in Africa as an agricultural specialist. He stayed in various countries of Africa, including Nigeria for 23 years as a researcher at ITTA (an international tropical agriculture research institute) and deputy director of its Department of Bulb Crop Improvement. In Africa, he succeeded in improving the seeds of various vegetables, especially the edible bulbs of plants such as cassava, yam and potatoes.
While in Africa, he collected many interesting proverbs used in various different regions of the African Continent, and published them in a book entitled ‘Africa, African People and African Proverbs’ in Seoul in 2010.