Twice a week at 8pm, households and roadside bars across the country hush as battery radios are powered up for the latest soap fix. The programme makers say 85 per cent of adults tune in.Such reach is possible only with radio, Africa’s most powerful medium Yet it can be a force for immense evil as well as good. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, presenters on the notorious Radio Mille Collines encouraged the slaughter with cries of: “The graves are not yet quite full. Who is going to help us fill them completely?” By the end, more than 500,000 Hutus and Tutsis lay dead.Now airing episode 520, Our Neighbours, or Umubanyi Niwe Muryanga in Kirundi, has the opposite aim. The plots are inspired by stories and gossip picked up on street corners and barstools, and forwarded to Marie-Louise Sibazuri, a Burundian exile living in Belgium. She skilfully mixes them with political developments to craft the now-famous scripts.Lena Slachmuijlder, manager with Studio Ijambo, which produces the soap, says: “It’s not moralistic, in terms of someone doing something wrong The humour is subtle and perceptive. It’s about rumour, stereotypes and prejudice.”By now, the cast has swelled to a confusing array of 60 characters.

But which ones are Hutu or Tutsi is deliberately kept obscure. Rose Marie Twajirayezu, who plays Mukamunwa, the village gossipmonger with a taste for beer, says: “In daily activities, there is no separation between Hutus and Tutsis. They go to church together, trade at the market or sit in buses. It is difficult to tell one from the other.”Sometimes the action cuts too close to the bone for the sensitive authorities. Police once tried to arrest the director after an episode depicting corrupt police.Later, a powerful civil servant, who recognised himself being portrayed as a character, tried to block an episode mid-broadcast. And because the show is on national radio, it is also subject to state censorship, although the last cut was made a year ago.Success has made national stars of the actors.

There is no Hello! magazine, but the fans recognise their heroes only by voice. “Even in a disco or a bar, people can know you,” says Adolphe Ntibasharira, who plays a scheming politician.Hopes for a peaceful resolution of the 10-year conflict came a step closer last week, when a Tutsi president peacefully handed power to a Hutu, Domitien Nzayizeye. The cast, like most Burundians, are only cautiously optimistic.”We are waiting to see. There are so many maybes, but nothing is sure,” Michel Ange Nzojibwame says.Happy endings are few in Burundi; and so it is with Our Neighbours. In the original love story plotline, Mbazumutima arrived too late, alas, to stop the wedding of his love, Natalie “Just like in real life,” Mr Nzojibwame adds.. The suicide bombings in Riyadh, in which at least seven Americans died, were putting even more pressure on relations between the US and Saudi Arabia yesterday. Links were already bedevilled by claims that the world’s pivotal oil producer was one of the prime breeding grounds of Islamic terrorism.

The American occupying army is struggling to impose order in Iraq and Washington is preparing to withdraw the bulk of its military forces stationed in Saudi Arabia, where their presence had been a long-standing source of resentment.On a brief stop at one of the devastated housing compounds yesterday, Colin Powell, the American Secretary of State, said the bombings had “all the fingerprints of al- Qa’ida” – the organisation led by Osama bin Laden, who was born in Saudi Arabia.Within hours, the FBI dispatched an assessment team to the Saudi capital. But there was no guarantee that it would not face the same subtle obstacles thrown in the way of investigators of similar attacks on US targets in the past, notably the 1996 truck bombing at Khobar Towers in Dhahran, which killed 19 Americans.US officials complained that they were not allowed full access to suspects. The lack of co-operation raised suspicions – hotly denied by the Saudis – of complicity between elements of the Saudi state, its intelligence services in particular, and Islamic groups behind the attacks.Yesterday’s bombings were not a surprise to Washington. The State Department warned this month of possible al-Qa’ida attacks on US targets in the kingdom.Though no group had claimed responsibility yesterday for the bombings, the four synchronised attacks, evidently timed to coincide with General Powell’s arrival, bore every sign of an al-Qa’ida operation “Obviously these facilities had been cased. The attacks were carefully planned and very well executed,” General Powell said, adding that the attacks “will not deter us and the Saudis in our mutual effort to go after international terrorism”.In truth, the unstinting co-operation of Riyadh will be crucial, if relations between the two countries are not to suffer.