How Africans got black skin

I once heard this story from an authority on West African oral culture, and since it doesn't seem to have made its way online yet, I thought I might as well share it with the world. I hope someone will come along with a better version that I can link to.

In the beginning, God made everybody the same: they all had black skin. But God appointed a time when everyone could come to the watering hole and wash the blackness off their skin. He set the time at ten o'clock in the morning.

Now, the European had a watch, so he made sure to be on time. But the African didn't worry so much about the time, and he got there late. Alas, by the time he arrived, the European had used up almost all the water washing the blackness off his skin. There was only enough water left to wipe the blackness off the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet.

This is why Africans to this day are black everywhere but their hands and feet. And it is also why the Europeans always go by the clock.

EDIT 2026: I also ran across this online, but can't manage to verify it: a legend in South America states that the people who arrived first to get washed turned out white, but the latecomers had to bathe in their dirty water and turned out brown.
What all these folklores have in common is that white people are at an advantage, due to a lack of procrastination on the part of their remote ancestors. This foundational thinking is very hard to overcome in third world cultures. Only when dark-skinned people are taken out of their native environment and allowed to flourish in a white-ruled society can they discover this to only be a myth after all: whiteness of the skin has absolutely nothing to do with one's chances of success in life. Alas,this foundational belief has undergone a major resurgence within my own lifetime, with the idea of "white privilege" taking over American academia.