Fiela is the last survivor of the southernmost elephant population on the planet. She lives in the Knysna Forest, located at the tip of South Africa between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth.
Fiela was named in reference to a novel by Dalene Matthee, a South African novelist whose other work ( Circles in the Forest ) made this region, its forest and its pachyderms famous in the 1980s. The past centuries have not been kind to its species everywhere on the continent.