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.