Dembe Nantale is a 19-year-old melanistic fennec fox from Kampala, Uganda. Dembe's father is a surgeon, her mother is an perioperative nurse, and they have four other children, including Dembe, the eldest. The children are cared for by numerous uncles, aunts, grandmothers, grandfathers and other relatives, who form a kind of clan of the urban technical elite of Kampala - doctors and organizers of medicine, power engineers and utility workers, builders and urbanists. Due to numerous connections and many years of work for the good of the city, this clan (more like an extended family than a clan in the classical sense) survived and achieved prosperity.

Dembe was very unlucky with her peculiarity - living in sunny Africa with black fur that absorbs the sun's rays is unbearable. She somehow survived under awnings and indoors, but any long walk threatened her with heat stroke. Therefore, quite early on she realized that sooner or later she would have to leave for a less sunny country.

In the mid-2010s, after finishing school, Dembe Nantale was enrolled in Sechenov University (or, as it is commonly called, First Med) and flew to cold and distant Moscow. After completing the preparatory faculty, she became a foreign student of the medical faculty.

Dembe is a cheerful, open and happy person, who has retained a lot of her childish traits. She finds it difficult to sit still, and she constantly walks while talking. However, once she sets a goal, she is quite capable of achieving it - for example, Dembe knows English, Swahili, French and Russian (especially swear words), and she learned Russian in a year and a half.