STTARS, a non-government organisation, has worked with many groups of refugees as they’ve arrived in SA from troublespots around the world. Just two years ago, the service dealt mainly with Middle Eastern and former Yugoslav arrivals. Now Africans are by far the largest number. “I don’t think you can say whether a refugee from Sudan or Somalia is more traumatised than the refugee from Kosovo or from Iraq,” STTARS director Bea McGrath says. “But I think it would be fair to say that the Sudanese have lived with the extremes of war and upheaval for decades. You’ve actually got generational issues, families that for as far back as anyone can remember have never known stability, have never been able to live without anxiety or fear.

“The thing I find remarkable,” she adds, “is they demonstrate such courage, such resilience and a remarkable ability to maintain hope, humor and a strong sense of care for each other. These are amazing qualities that this community demonstrates.”

In pockets of Adelaide – around Kilburn, in the western suburbs, and parts of the CBD – it’s like Africa’s suddenly discovered us. Tall, slender women with beaded hair juggle babies on the buses, black teenagers giggle together in shopping centres, and African families are packing the pews at local churches. An African (Tanzanian) shop has opened near the Central Market and recently 200 Sudanese locals staged a celebration of their culture and the recent Sudan peace accord at a Festival Centre showcase.

In 2003-04 more than 11,800 people arrived in Australia in its “humanitarian” intake – about 8300 were Africans and principally Sudanese, the biggest influx ever from Africa, driven by changing international priorities and sponsorship from Christian churches. Last year the Sudanese made up the second largest group in SA’s total intake of 4591 new settlers – migrants and refugees together. But while they’re highly visible, they’re by no means landing in hordes – only 363 arrived last year, compared to 1269 from the UK, our largest source nation.

That’s obviously a big jump on the seven Sudanese who came in 1994, but the total community is believed to number only around 2000, with another 3000 or so having come from elsewhere in Africa over the past decade – mainly South Africans but also refugees from Burundi to Zambia.

It marks a shift in the cultural sand. Chef Dorinda Hafner, originally from Ghana, recalls arriving in Adelaide 27 years ago as one of the first Africans to settle here. “My God, it was a nightmare,” she says with a laugh. “People used to come and touch me in the streets to make sure I was real. Kids used to try to wash my face clean.” Sudanese elder Ben Yengi has different memories – coming in the 1970s when ‘black was beautiful’ in the arts and academic worlds. “There were only about three of us in Adelaide at the time and, to some extent, it was special to be very rare,” he remembers. He rejoices in the growing numbers as “a dream come true” but notes they’ve changed the community dynamics, much like the Italians and Greeks before them. Where just a few years ago everyone would get together to celebrate a wedding or new arrival, now they tend to split up more into regional groups, although Yengi says there’s no tribal tension at play.

What will happen to numbers in coming years no one really knows – Canberra expects a similar focus on Africa next year, and family reunion will add to the population for a while, but Yengi’s doubtful the surge will continue. “Africa is a place (Australia) responds to when there’s disaster. When there’s not, you just forget it.”

Still their current visibility is attracting some unwelcome attention. An anti-immigration group recently targeted the Sudanese in NSW. There’s no sign of organised opposition in SA but racism is a concern at many levels. Seventeen-year-old David Dau is stung by comments he and his friends cop – “One guy said, ‘hey I’ve got a picture of you’ and he waved this photo of a monkey.” When Guor Miabok was enrolling for pharmacy he was repeatedly asked if he was sure he had the right course. “What comes to (Australians’) minds when they see you is music or sport, not academic areas,” he says. “So they do not expect you to excel in other things.”

There have been incidents of racial violence, stone-throwing and harassment, but agencies are aware that many more may go unreported, with many Sudanese fearful of police or worried they’d be sent home if they spoke out.

Sometimes they’re on the wrong side of the law themselves – struggling with new norms at the opposite end of the earth. Young Sudanese guys get into trouble because they don’t realise they need a licence here to drive a car and neighborhood disputes blow out because little kids – born in squalid camps and never knowing private property – are yelled at for racing into other people’s front yards to try out swings and see-saws. In response, SA police are taking special steps to nurture trust and understanding, inviting elders and agencies to address local officers about cultural issues and actively seeking to recruit Sudanese officers. “We’re also educating police about the role elders play in the community, about extended families and arranged marriages – things like that divorce isn’t a simple issue for a Sudanese person if a dowry’s been paid,” says SAPOL Aboriginal and multicultural liaison officer Thea Faithfull.

Other issues also impact – the guilt many Sudanese feel at being safe while relatives still live in abject poverty or fear, the financial stress of trying to send money home, and low-level tensions between Sudan’s 13 main tribes and the north-south divide.

STTARS worker Ayen Kuol, herself a refugee, tells how one student from the north complained that others wouldn’t sit with him during school lunchbreaks. “You people were killing us,” the others told him. “What do you expect?” It’s understandable but overlooks how many Muslims have also fled the Khartoum regime.

Physical problems can also go unaided, with few local GPs able to deal ordinarily with conditions now alien to South Australians – malnutrition, exotic parasites, the impact of chronic malaria.

For SA’s principal settlement agency, the Migrant Resource Centre, unemployment is the major issue and rife among the Sudanese, even though many are qualified and middle-class. “If we don’t find solutions to address that problem, then first of all their aspirations aren’t going to be dealt with, but secondly we’re going to miss out economically on productive diversity,” says MRC executive director Eugenia Tsoulis. “To have people with qualifications and skills and knowledge of different ways of doing things is extremely important to Australia’s economic development but also to cohesiveness.”

Under such pressures, some families face the sad irony of surviving the ravages of war only to fall apart in the face of freedom. TAFE lecturer Lawrence Udo-Ekbo, author of The Africans in Australia, says a simmering issue is the emasculation many African men feel if they can’t get a job, while their wives and children begin to assert rights here. “African men like to be the breadwinner, the head of the family,” he says. “It’s a power thing, but here in Australia they see that power being taken away from them in many ways; that even Centrelink gives the family money to the women,” he says. Many teenagers also work out they’ll be better off financially if they leave home early and live on study benefits, further eroding the traditional family unit.

Abur Malual’s husband died in the fighting many years before she and their three children came to Adelaide, rescued finally from a decade-long ordeal of living in the wretched Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. “You’re always thinking about your life, that maybe you’re going to die soon, today or tomorrow,” she said.