'His brother told me he had pneumonia. We all know what that means: AIDS'

'A dead man, and now a white man, what a week!' chuckled David, heading his taxi into Mombasa's choking streets. My mind had been wandering over suicide bombers and Osama bin Laden, and surely I hadn't hear that right. 'I had a corpse in the car,' said David Mathari, spelling it out as exactly as he had haggled over his rate. 'Two days ago. A young chap, just 32 years of age, he was sitting where you are now.'

Death is never far off in Kenya. In fact, I was in Mombasa to report on an al-Qaida bomb attack, that killed 15 people, including three Israeli tourists. But, David's story sounded even more startling. His previous fare, he explained, had been a few stones of dulled-eyed, glossy skin and protruding bone. 'His brother told me he had pneumonia,' he said, 'Well, we all know what that means: AIDS.'

The dying man's family instructed David to drive him 800 miles across Kenya, from the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria and his hometown of Kisumu. 'It's better to get them back for the funeral before they're dead,' David said. 'Corpses cost more to transport, and mothers like to see their sons before they die.' So, David headed west, racing across Kenya's perilous roads for a day and a night, against his passenger's imminent death. From the passenger seat, the dying man's gasps for air grew steadily fainter. At last, in the pitch-black, he fell silent.

As dawn broke over Nakuru, a tin-rooved trading town, David stopped to find his passenger dead. 'I propped his head up, to see if he'd start breathing again,' said David, cupping his hand in the air. 'But it was all over for that one.'

David switched course for Kisumu morgue, where the dead man's parents were waiting. They offered him a white cockerel to throw from his car-window, to chase away the ghost of their son. But David, who belongs to one of Kenya's less-superstitious tribes, preferred to accept a small bonus, and headed straight home.

'They wanted me to stay but I know those people,' he said. 'They'd have been doing their magic all night, and I'd have had no sleep.'

David had just driven me to another morgue, in Mombasa. Dozens of naked bodies, of old people, thirty-somethings, children, lay putrifying in its windowless corridors, stinking in the tropical heat. And, by Kenyan standards, the AIDS rate is low in Mombasa. The morgue in Kisumu, the epicentre of Kenya's pandemic, where one in three people is infected, including 90% of the city's maids, is better not imagined.

Thankfully for me, I'm unlikely ever to visit. The world's press was in Kenya that day only for al-Qaida. There hadn't been such interest in Kenya since 1998, when al-Qaida blew up the American embassy in Nairobi, and killed 215 people, including 12 Americans. Following this latest attack, Kenya's dictator at the time, Daniel arap Moi had already rushed to Washington, to be praised for his stout support for the war on terror.

But, Kenyans wondered whether Mr Moi had his priorities straight. They were not surprised that Western countries don't care too much about their 2.5 million AIDS victims. Europe and America have little AIDS to speak of. And so, 18 months after its launch, the much-vaunted Global AIDS fund still had barely a fifth of its $10 billion target.

But Kenyans did wonder why their government's pitch for a share of that cash was so corrupt that it had to be turned down. They wondered also why the aging Mr Moi had personally marched through Nairobi in memory of the victims of 9/11; but almost never mentioned the 800 Kenyans who die of AIDS every day. In Mombasa, western journalists crowded round the bereaved families of Kenya's latest terrorist victims. Again and again, they asked the widows what they would do now, with ten children and no income, without even the necessary pittance to retrieve their husbands' corpses from the city morgue. But, the widows just shrugged, confused by the question. Because, in Kenya, these things are considered normal.