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When Kenya erupted in murderous rioting after elections in December, I was watching it through a Web browser.

By most accounts, the incumbent president, one Mwai Kibaki, had stolen the election. Results at the constituency level indicated a resounding win for the opposition, but when the chair of the electoral commission announced the returns, looking haggard and — he later admitted — feeling pressured, the tally had mysteriously shifted in favour of the government.

The country, which had seemed poised for real progress, suddenly seemed to disintegrate into the worst of African caricatures.

The last time Kenya faced the aftermath of an election, I was sitting on a bus, crossing the border into the country from neighbouring Tanzania.

It was 2003, and the country was in a state of jubilation. Its first genuinely free and fair election had just taken place, and the ruling party had, rather fantastically, given way to the election's victors.

For the first time in the living memory of a younger generation, the country had a new leader.

WHERE TO HELP ONLINE:

• Kenya Red Cross The Kenya Red Cross is doing front-line relief work in Kenya, and accepts donations of all sizes on its website, thanks to Google Checkout software.
• Ushahidi.com Put together by a coalition of Kenyan bloggers, Ushahidi (Kiswahili for "witness") is a Web- and SMS-driven service for reporting acts of violence in the crisis, and it maintains a list of ways to help online. Their blog also tracks fundraising events being held around the world by the Kenyan diaspora.
• Canada Helps Closer to home, Canada Helps is a database of every charity that's registered with the Canadian government, and it lets readers donate directly through the website. If you want to do more research on a charity before giving — always advisable — the site will give you the contact information you need.

As we ground through a border checkpoint a few days into the new year, a man walking alongside the bus saw me leaning out the window. He looked up and yelled, "Who is the president of Kenya?"

"Mwai Kibaki" I yelled back. There were yells of assent from the crowd. The man grinned and flashed me the V-for-victory hand sign that the opposition had adopted in those days.

I've been returning to that image in my mind lately, as I press my nose against the glass of my computer screen. The Internet is no substitute for being there, as I once was as a thoroughly disoriented young intern. Yet it still provides perspectives that nobody had access to until recently. In this instance, a network of Kenyan bloggers and commentators have been filling the void with updates, pleas, and some very graphic imagery.

Yet the more I looked, the more futile the exercise seemed. What good is this vast global network of instant communications? It's all well and good to join a Facebook group protesting the genocide in Darfur, or the violence in Kenya. But does giving Westerners the ability to see a foreign conflict unfold in intimate detail increase their ability to effect change?

"It's definitely created a more educated world than we've ever had before," said Nikki Whaites, who directs the international program at Journalists for Human Rights, a Toronto-based organization.

But, she added, "There doesn't seem to be a practical way to follow up with that."

Kenya is a relatively wired place, though the scope of its connectedness is still limited. The country has a growing middle class that, at least in the cities, makes good use of the cybercafés that dot the landscape. Office connections and satellite hookups are also common. But home access is still relatively rare, and it's inconceivable for the many Kenyans who live without power in slums and underdeveloped rural areas.

Rebecca Wanjiku, a Nairobi-based journalist and consultant who keeps tabs on the Kenyan blogosphere for Global Voices Online, an international blog-monitoring service, says that the Internet has been a mixed blessing in a time of crisis.

For those able to read them, she told me, blogs filled an acute void for those who didn't feel they were getting reliable information from the national media, a blend of state-run and corporate outlets. Blogs became especially important after the embattled government slapped a ban on live broadcasting, which shut down not only the country's newscasts but also its vibrant talk-radio scene.

As well, Kenyan blogs proved themselves susceptible to the same risks as blogs anywhere else in the world: as conduits for strident partisan opinion. In a fractious federal state comprising diverse peoples who weren't especially consulted by the British when the country's borders were drawn up around them, the same pattern of ethnic incitement that led to bloodshed throughout the country also took to the Web.

It went beyond blogging. One of the country's leading online forums, formerly at Mashada.com, had to be shut down after the conversation took an ugly race-baiting turn. The site has since returned, promoting a new project: a site called I Have No Tribe (www.ihavenotribe.com), espousing a spirit of pan-tribal nationalism in response to the crisis.

There's also the risk of the bubble effect. Wanjiku points to the restricted scope of Internet access as a factor that limits both the reporting and the reach of what's online.

"Those people who are writing the blogs are not directly affected" by the conflict, she said. "Right now, we're talking to ourselves."

It's a good thing, then, that the Web isn't the only way to go. If Internet access is limited in Kenya, cellphones are ubiquitous, thanks to pay-as-you-go scratch cards and cheap text-messaging rates. It was text messages that helped spread news of unrest and fan the flames of violence in the first place. Now, organizations like Ushahidi.com have been asking Kenyans to text-message reports of violence. The reports are then posted online using a Google Maps mash-up for the world to see, and messages of peace are returned to the senders.

The online store at mamamikes.com gave foreigners, and especially members of the Kenyan diaspora, the ability to purchase airtime minutes and digitally send messages to mobile phones in areas where stores were closed and scratch cards unavailable.

And sites like Kenya IndyMedia have been using those digitally distributed cellphone minutes to secure interviews with those affected on the ground. Its website contains podcasts, interviews, testimonials and photo essays.

Reports like this can resonate at home and abroad.

"More and more mainstream media journalists in the international press are looking to bloggers as a sort of informal poll of what the local population thinks," said Solana Larsen, who co-edits Global Voices from New York.

Global Voices is a website with a mandate to facilitate that kind of polling. A pragmatic service, it hires bloggers around the world like Rebecca Wanjiku in Nairobi and her colleague, Kenyan expatriate Juliana Rotich in Chicago, to keep an eye on their country's blogosphere and write English-language reports on the tenor of that online discussion.

"It balances the image that has been given by the international media," Wanjiku said, pointing to coverage from foreign outlets like CNN that follows the old news adage that "if it bleeds, it leads." (Indeed, the violence hasn't been as unrelenting as the pictures on TV might seem to suggest; daily life is back to normal in some parts of the country.) She has a point. Despite the outstanding coverage coming from the likes of The Globe's Stephanie Nolen and Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times, the fact remains that — online and offline — Africa pops up on our media landscape only at times of crisis.

One of the most trenchant emotions to filter out of Kenya throughout the crisis is heartbreak. Not just for the dead, the wounded and the displaced, but also for the national project that so many had helped to build. Kenyans have had their work cut out for them, and over the course of years had been muddling through a course of constitutional reform and nation-building. Reading what's coming from Kenya, it's hard to avoid the sense that more than an election was stolen from its people.

The Western compulsion is to look at a crisis and ask what we can do. It's a noble sentiment, if maybe a patronizing one. The industry of Africa-saving is pretty deeply entrenched in these parts, lurching from one dubious mega-concert to the next. It only makes sense to look at the Internet — social wonder that it is — and ask how it can be used to extend that mission.

But I learned something from living there, something that's proved all too easy to forget: Africa, in the end, is going to save itself. There is a role for international interventionism, and aid, and education, and yes, even whiz-bang technology — but the Internet isn't there to help us save Africa.

We can donate, we can support, we can exert policy pressure in our own spheres. But most of all, we can see how an educated citizenry organizes itself and pushes back. We should watch, I think, and learn.