The lizard, faster and undistracted, overtakes the chameleon along the way and reaches the people first, delivering its message of death before the chameleon arrives with the message of life it was originally sent to carry. Because the lizard's message arrives first, tradition holds, death becomes the fate of humanity, even though the intended, kinder message had been the first one dispatched; the chameleon's later arrival, message of life in hand, no longer has any power to reverse what the people have already been told and, in most tellings, already accepted as true and irreversible.
This message-race motif, in which a slow-moving animal carrying good news is beaten by a faster one carrying bad news, recurs with different messenger animals across a wide range of Bantu-speaking and other southern and central African traditions, which comparative folklorists treat as a shared etiological pattern for the origin of death rather than a story unique to the Zulu telling alone. Axel-Ivar Berglund's ethnographic work on Zulu religious thought records this account among the core narratives explaining uNkulunkulu's relationship to human mortality, alongside his role as the more distant, largely inactive figure behind creation itself, and notes that the chameleon's continued reputation for slowness in everyday speech still carries an echo of this founding failure.