海角大神

Growing up, much of Peter Deng鈥檚 world revolved around stories. In the cattle camps where he was raised in southern Sudan, 鈥渨e passed down our history through songs,鈥� he says.

When the country鈥檚 brutal civil war forced him to flee his home at the age of 18, he took those stories with him. And when, a decade later, he received the news that he was being resettled from the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya to Australia, the stories he鈥檇 memorized all those years before traveled there, too.

But as he made his life as a refugee in Australia, Mr. Deng began to worry. Many of the southern Sudanese he met in Australia had either been born abroad or were too young when they left to remember life there. They knew little of their community鈥檚 history. They tripped over the words when they tried to speak their mother tongues.聽聽

鈥淚 didn鈥檛 want people to forget where they came from,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 wanted them to know the history they were a part of.鈥�

In 2009, Mr. Deng began scouring the internet for books on southern Sudanese history to share with other refugees in Australia, but quickly discovered that many were out of print or prohibitively expensive because they were so rare. He imported what he could from Kenya, the United States, and the United Kingdom, but realized that if he were to make his country鈥檚 literature and history more accessible, he needed to start printing it himself.

Mr. Deng had never worked in publishing. Since arriving in Australia he鈥檇 been an electrician, spray-painted the logo of a pet food company on buildings, made pastries, ran a day care, and started a butchery. But along the way, he鈥檇 earned a degree in international business at Victoria University in Melbourne, and so he figured, why not try book publishing next?

In 2012, he founded Africa World Books. Today, the company prints its titles largely on demand, which Mr. Deng says has allowed him to sidestep the traditional financial barriers to publishing and distribute a much wider range of texts. He sells not just the old-school histories of southern Sudan written by missionaries and Western academics, but also more contemporary history books, memoirs, and language textbooks written by South Sudanese themselves.

The books, he says, are meant to be a resource for both the South Sudanese diaspora and Australians curious about their new neighbors. 鈥淎ustralians are a kind people, but they don鈥檛 always know who we are,鈥� he says.

Currently, Africa World Books stocks about four dozen titles, and Mr. Deng says its most popular are grammar manuals for languages commonly spoken in South Sudan 鈥� which became independent from Sudan in 2011 鈥� like Dinka and Acholi.

Ajak Duany Ajak, a South Sudanese mining consultant who lives in Perth, like Mr. Deng, recently bought a book called 鈥淭he Dinka鈥檚 Grammar鈥� to learn more about the structure of a language he has spoken from birth. He says he hopes to eventually start teaching Dinka to younger South Sudanese in Australia.

鈥淚f you lose your language, then you lose your culture as a South Sudanese. It鈥檚 as simple as that,鈥� he says. 鈥淎nd if we cannot read and write Dinka, there will come a time with all of us spread around the world that our stories written in Dinka will disappear.鈥澛�

Like Mr. Deng, Mr. Ajak worries about what it means that so many South Sudanese don鈥檛 know their own homeland because of the wars that have convulsed it for decades. Hundreds of thousands live outside the country, and some 25,000 people born in either Sudan or South Sudan live in Australia.

鈥淩eading our history can be part of our healing,鈥� Mr. Deng says. 鈥淏ecause we come from an oral culture, this is a job none of my ancestors had, but I think it鈥檚 one they would respect.鈥�

Editor鈥檚 note: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of Victoria University, and incorrectly identified the town where Africa World Books was first founded.