Holawaka, 'the sheep of God', is the messenger bird of Oromo mythology and the central figure of the Oromo account of how death came into the world. In the story, Waaqa sent the bird to tell human beings that they would not die: when they grew old and weak they had only to slip off their skins to renew their youth. To authenticate the message Waaqa gave the bird a crest as the badge of his office. On the way, however, the hungry bird came upon a serpent devouring a carcass and would not be refused a share; in payment it sold the message, telling the serpent that people would die when they grew old but that the serpent would cast its skin and grow young again. So mortality fell to humankind and renewal to the snakes, and Waaqa, angered at his herald's betrayal, afflicted the bird with a painful disease, so that it sits wailing in the tree-tops to this day. The tale, made widely known through James Frazer's comparative study of fall-of-man narratives and included in modern dictionaries of African mythology, gives the Waaqeffanna tradition its individuated, named actor in the widespread African myth of the perverted message.