Sometimes it's hard to understand what Frank is saying. His first language is French, and he speaks a variety of Congolese dialects, so part of the difficulty is the mixture of accents.

But he has a different way of seeing things, of describing things. This is what I love about our friendship - following his thoughts and walking in his world for a bit.

When we first met, I asked him about the music of his homeland. He gave me a few names to check out - Koffi Olomide, Papa Wemba, Reddy Amis, Werasson, JB Piana and Roga Roga. I eagerly sought out their compact discs in KTOO's music library and featured the ones I could find on my radio show.

I found Olomide and Wemba, who perform a lively style of African popular music that mixes elements of African and Western rhythms.

"Koffi (Olomide) is like somebody that start music a long time ago, so all the way just keep going," Frank told me. "When you listen to it, you have to dance. You gotta dance," he said.

I read on the Internet that Wemba began his career performing a Congolese style of dance music called soukous, which developed in the European work camps in the early 1900s. That genre mixes indigenous and European traditions and, in modern times, adds guitars, brass, bass, drums and keyboards for an energetic, pulsing, exuberant music.

Early on, Wemba used traditional instruments, such as the lokole, or log drum, to accompany his music. He appeared on stage in a traditional raffia skirt and cowrie shell hat, which excited his fans and drew them toward their heritage. He later spent time in France, formed a new band, and changed his style to a more urbanized Afro-pop-style sound.

Today, Olomide and Wemba perform live shows to enthusiastic audiences around the world.

Frank's homeland is one of the most war-torn regions of Africa. A San Francisco Chronicle article (June 9, 2003) described "tens of thousands of refugees in flight, ethnic-based mass murder, killers jubilantly draping themselves in the entrails of their victims, rival militias using child soldiers - 10- and 11-year-old boys bearing AK-47s and hand grenades. Such horrors are but the latest in a civil war whose death toll, in less than five years, is estimated by the International Rescue Committee at 3.3 million at least. This is the greatest such bloodshed anywhere on Earth since the end of World War II."

Frank explained, "the government is good and it's not so good, also. They don't make the population happy. War too much. War about gas. The population, they don't have anything. People suffer, people sick, they don't have money for medication. If you don't have money, you gonna die, so you gotta make sure you got the money. War still going. Just kill people for nothing. Kill children, kill women. Just too much. And so Africa is not good right now. We got gold, we got gas, wood, manganese, aluminum, all those kinda things, but the government just stealing, stealing, stealing, just anything from the population. So that's why they start another war, and the people die for nothing."

I asked if Congolese musicians sing about politics, the suffering and the realities of life there.

"Mostly they don't sing about the politic," he answered. "They sing to make people happy. They sing about something to make the life better. We wanna sing to make people happy."

I get the point.