The Frank Chus of Yaounde

There's a guy in San Francisco named Frank Chu. He wears a raincoat and
sunglasses all the time and marches around town with a big sign that has
obscure messages about politics and outer space. Sometimes he harangues
people in a low, gutteral voice that indicates this is not just an act,
but he's never violent, and usually quiet. San Francisco has embraced
him, fine town that it is, with a long tradition of eccentrics dating
back at least to Norton I, Emperor of the United States, and you can see
people dressed up like Frank at Halloween parties. One downtown
establishment paid for advertising space on the back of Frank's sign.
There's a bar called 12 Galaxies in the Mission district that probably
took its name from one of his slogans. Frank even has his own extensive
wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Chu

Yaounde has some characters like this, eccentrics of long standing who
are at least tolerated, if not exactly embraced, and since we take taxis
to and from work, we have slowly gotten to see them. There's one guy,
the Mud Man, who runs around in traffic near the Brasserie (bottling
plant) when it jams up there, wearing nothing but a pair of briefs, not
even shoes, holding a big pile of mud in one hand. He's loud,
boisterous, and approaches drivers to extort money from them. The taxi
guy we were with tried to roll up his window but wasn't fast enough, and
ended up muttering something and giving the guy a coin as the mud
hovered near his face, just out the window. We've heard the Mud Man
also likes to taxi-surf, and will jump up on a vehicle's roof and cling
to the top lip of the windshield while it speeds through traffic and he
sings at the top of his lungs. We did see someone doing this recently
in our neighborhood, from a distance, but he had clothes on, so I'm
wondering whether it was the same guy.

And then there's the guy who thinks he's a cop. He hangs out in the
neighborhood northeast of where we live, so we only see him if the taxi
takes an indirect route to or from work. He's older, and wears a beret,
a whistle, and his own very rumpled version of a police uniform without
insignia. He likes to stand in the middle of the street (traffic is a
lot slower here, and this is not too unusual in itself), waving his arms
and blowing his whistle and looking stern. Today, on the way in, he
thumped the hood of our cab, and at first I thought it was a real
policeman, since we were indeed in the middle of a small traffic tie-up,
and he banged the other cars. But Ann spied who it was, gleefully, and
pointed him out. As we watched, he took issue with some other
unfortunate taxi driver and actually bawled him out; we heard him
yelling "tu fait quoi?" while the driver tried hard to ignore him.

We might not have found out about these guys if we didn't take taxis to
and from work, or if we hired our own exclusive taxi instead of sharing
them the way Cameroonians do. It's almost as cramped as the buses I
described elsewhere, with a lot less headroom, and we're always lugging
big backpacks full of laptops, but it's a good way to see the city from
street level on a regular basis, and get to know it in a way we might
have missed. It's tempting to bring a camera out on these rides, but
I'm divided on that question.