His name was Bienvenue. We had drinks once or twice, in fact I didn't know him that well but when you have a beer with half a dozen guys, everyone at the table becomes your friend from then on. He was tall and good-looking, with an easy smile. He was smiling to on the big-size photograph pinned to the gate of his house last week, welcoming everyone entering the house for the wake. His brother just said he was sick, his best friend explained that the doctor would only talk to the direct family regarding the cause of his death. But most people gathered around the house for the five-day wake assumed he was felled by the big disease with the short name.

The day before I started writing this article I had dinner in Gaspard's, the most cosmopolitan of the town's restaurants, with a Canadian friend visiting from Luanda where he works. I took along two young women I know, one of whom, Chantal, speaks fairly good English, so as to entertain my guest. Half-way through dinner, one of the last heavy rains of the season started beating down on the roof, sending the diners outside rushing for shelter. Chantal, casually mentioned that she might not make it to the wake she was supposed to attend that night, since the area she'd have to go would be difficult to access because of mud. Sad, she said, that Ya Willie's niece should die so soon after him. My fork stopped in mid air. "Ya Willie ?!" I asked, frowning. She confirmed to my great shock that the man to which she was referring was indeed the Ya Willie I knew, and that he had been buried three weeks earlier. I had met him maybe a month earlier on the road. Now Willie was one of the coolest guys I knew in this town, a good deejay and great dancer, always wearing dark glasses since he had lost one eye in a bike crash some years back. He was someone really nice and down to hang out with... I hadn't seen him for a while but I was always in a rush so he took my number and promised he'd call, said we'd go out. Chantal said he seemed to be sleeping in the casket, in his jacket and bow tie. He passed away and I didn't get to go to his final farewell. I kind of went off the meal after that.

It's hard to get figures on the number of actual Aids casualties here, the reason being that the two causes cited for every death are Aids and witchcraft. In addition, many Aids cases are said to be due to witchcraft, which make things even more complicated to assess. It's not cool to lose weight around here: right away your friends and neighbours be talking behind your back, glancing at you, trying to detect whether your lips are turning pink, a telling sign of having caught the virus. Whatever the cause, in this town you could easily find a different wake to go to for every day of the year. People seem to be dying like flies and a large proportion are relatively young people.

A couple of years ago, I had first-hand experience of just how desperate the situation of infected people here is. The niece of the family I was renting a house from had got sick. She was a pretty woman, dark, petite, in her late twenties. In fact, since she was real thin and had always been so, the weight loss was the last thing her family noticed. I came home one evening to find a noisy commotion in the yard: Yvette had had a stroke. Half of her face was paralysed, her left arm also. Over the next few months, Yvette attended an hospital, a Chinese clinic and some traditional practitioners centre, all of which just about helped to make her comfortable but didn't really improved her condition. Whether she already knew the truth or not was hard to tell but in any case she was getting on with her life. Although she was, of course, ordered off drinking beer, I caught her a few times sipping quietly in her room.

One night, while Yvette was sitting by the makeshift barbecue where she sold grilled fish, her sister had me sit down and bought me a beer. We often used to talk, since she had a Cameroonese mother and could handle pidgin English all right. After a while, motioning towards her sister, she said Yvette should stop working the barbecue, night after night because the fire was eating away her strength. I tried to figure out what she was talking about at first. Then I recalled the Yvette used to spend her entire evenings sitting in front of the dancing flames, staring at them in silence. Yvette's sister looked at me and told me plainly: "She go die soon: she have the sickness." It threw a chill on me, both because I hadn't really thought about it before and also the way she could calmly anticipate her younger sister's death. She was right: Yvette died three months later. But it was the pain, the rapid deterioration of her weak body while she fully conscious, which marked me. I didn't see them but her sister told me she had a lot of infected boils all over her lower abdomen. Quickly, her right eye, the side affected by the stroke, started to rot inside its socket. Yvette went through hell. To the end, despite the family's attempts to keep her daughter away for understandable reasons, she tried to hang on to her child.

The medicines from the hospital, expensive as they were for the family to buy, hardly soothed her pain and her suffering will remained forever engraved in my memory. Even in her last few weeks, Yvette refused to stay in the hospital as the doctors wanted, and I understand why. One morning I had to take her there myself, since the taxis were hard to find (one of the regular fuel shortages...) and I had a pickup available. When we go to the women's ward, a dozen patients sat waiting for the doctor to see them. He, seated at his table in the corridor, was taking notes and calling them one by one. Yvette's screams were drilling through my brain and I asked the man, using the little Lingala I had managed to learn (French is somewhat more difficult) to please give her a painkiller right away. Looking up from his notebook, he said I had to pay 3000 CFA francs (a little over £3) first, then she would get the shot. I almost lost my temper and pointed at her bandaged eye, telling him I had the goddam money, to just get up and help her. Of course I realised later that that doctor was more or less detached from all this horror, he has to keep working. Inside the ward, some on single rusting metal beds, some on fibre mats, 20 women lay. This was the terminus and one stare into their gaunt faces told you they all knew it. Some had visitors bringing them food, some were alone, but all had the same vacant eyes, the same dark ashy skin over their thin tormented bodies. The smell, the whispering of the roaming angel was all around. It wasn't hard to understand why Yvette was refusing to stay there. She died 10 days later... in the hospital.

About a year ago, in a bar, I had heard men discussing the disease one afternoon. One of them voiced the opinion that Aids didn't actually exist but was just a rumour spread by Europeans to sell condoms. I don't believe it is a view shared by too many people in the Congo, not anymore anyway. The government has sponsored various projects to raise the awareness of the population, sending health workers in the interior where the lack of proper roads often prevents villagers from getting vital information about the disease. But it's in town that the real problem lies. Pointe-Noire is an oil town. Standing on the beach, you can actually see a dozen rigs just a couple of miles out on the ocean and the whole coast, all the way down to Cabinda and Angolais full of them. Nkossa, the largest offshore platform in the world and operated by Elf Congo, lies about 50 miles offshore; it is, in fact, a full refinery and treats thousands of gallons of crude oil a day. I've worked there: it looks like a five storey shopping mall, long as two football pitches, full of tanks, metal hoses and pumps. The revenue from the oil business are huge, too big for the country's good, in fact, and the latest and most murderous civil conflict that ended two years ago was more about money than politics.

However, apart from the fact that the wealth generated has by no means benefited the poorer classes, the by-product of the oil industry has been a social problem which is only now being recognised by some. A large expatriate, European and American contingent (mostly men, as few live here full-time) and a largely poor local population has proved an explosive mix. Some years ago a number of young women, mostly from neighbouring countries, catered for the sexual needs of the expatriate workers. Nowadays, the combination of a deteriorating economy, the breakdown of traditional family structures and authority, as well as the displacement of rural populations brought about by the civil war means that many young Congolese women are now making a living through prostitution.

And the term 'young' is to be taken very literally... The two or three night clubs frequented by the oil workers uptown are full of teenagers who have long ago forsaken school to spend their nights in those smoky places where morality takes a back seat to commerce. They are lured by the promise of meagre earning fuelled by loud disco music and alcohol. Once again, the other side of the story makes it uneasy to condemn those young girls.

Natasha has the face of a 13-year-old. Brown-skinned, dreamy eyes and finely chiselled features, she has the look and the build of a doll. At night, her make-up on and wearing a tight Lycra dress, she does look her 16 years and even a bit more. She can usually be found around eight o'clock in front of a club just outside the market area, together with a dozen of her female friends. They hang out around the tables of the open air terrace, drinking and smoking until they all drift inside the club later to dance to the local rhythms. I got friendly with the owner when I first got here, so I'd pass by once or twice a week to drink a Guinness - that's how I got to know Natasha and some of her friends. They're just happy to talk, curious to know other places, countries they hear so much about but only dream of. Their outfits are straight out of the US artists' music videos aired by the TV stations. As the night progresses, they will move on to the uptown clubs to do business.

Last year, a local doctor died. What made people talk was that he'd lost his life to Aids, that was one case about which there was no doubt. That doctor had a taste for young girls, that is also an established fact. It was said he used to see quite a few, on a regular basis. He was said not to use any protection in his encounters with these girls (a doctor, think about it). You might have guessed it, Natasha was one of his 'clients'. Now the rumour is that she, and a few others like her, has got the virus. Last time I saw her was a couple of months ago. She said hello, as usual, before she slipped inside the club and I couldn't tell whether there was any obvious signs of sickness but maybe she looked thinner, or maybe not. In any case, some of the good doctor's girls will die, that's for sure.

A friend of mine I was talking to the other day told me: "it's bad, I know, but if you want, I'll take you to Natasha's house, so you can see where she lives." He went on to explain that his cousin lives next door and in Natasha's yard dwell her mother, aunt, two brothers and one younger sister, plus a couple of cousins who fled the village during the war. She's the sole bread earner for that family...

Aids is a long way to being tackled, let alone vanquished. It's never as simple as we think. There's one aspect of the problem in the affluent nations and another in the southern hemisphere. Awareness campaigns are useful, to a point and surely all must be done so that women especially are given information and have access to advice. But economics play a large part in the equation. A few of the girls I talked to during my research told me they are often offered more money by expatriate 'customers' not to use a condom! Where does the buck actually stop?

All names are real, all stories mentioned here are authentic, there is absolutely no fiction in the above account.

Victor's new book Off Duty is published by Hodder & Stoughton at £10.99