Chameleon

A god decides what will happen to people and sends word. The chameleon is given the message that people will not die. A second animal, usually a lizard, is sent afterwards with the opposite message, or sets off on its own initiative. The chameleon walks in its own manner, slowly, stopping, swaying; the lizard runs. The lizard arrives first, the wrong message is delivered and accepted, and death becomes permanent.

Versions of this are recorded from the Zulu, the Ngoni, the Bechuana, the Akan, the Yoruba and many others across sub-Saharan Africa. The casting varies, the reason for the chameleon's delay varies, and in some versions it stops to eat. What does not vary is the structure: death enters the world through a delivery failure, not through a sin and not through a punishment.

This is worth stating plainly because it is unlike the account most readers will bring. There is no disobedience, no forbidden thing, and no fall. Death is a clerical error at the beginning of the world, and no one is at fault in a way that requires atonement.

The story explains the animal as much as the animal carries the story. A chameleon does move like that, and the association with the delivery of bad news attaches to it in ordinary speech and in attitudes toward the living animal, which is often avoided.

The chameleon's colour change carries a second and more positive reading, best documented in Yoruba tradition, where it is used as an image for the completeness of the creator. A being that can be any colour is not one colour among several; it is the whole range held together, and the argument runs from there to the nature of Olodumare.

An account told of Olodumare and the chameleon has the creator send the animal to test whether the earth is firm enough to walk on, its careful step being exactly the right instrument for the job. The chameleon is used, in other words, for the same slowness that condemns it in the origin of death story, and here the slowness is competence rather than failure.

The physical fact is more interesting than the folklore assumes. Chameleons do not change colour to match their background in the way the idiom suggests. The change is driven mainly by temperature, mood and signalling to other chameleons, and is produced by nanocrystal lattices in the skin rather than by pigment moving about. A chameleon on a chessboard does not go checked.

Both readings survive in the same regions, and there is no sign that either displaced the other. An animal can be the one who lost the message and the one who tested the ground, and the traditions carrying both do not appear to find that a problem.