Johannesburg, South Africa ? The photographs of the tortured body of an opposition official are blurry but chilling.

Posted on the “This is Zimbabwe” blog, they show charred, lacerated limbs and blank eyes staring out from the face of the official, Gift Mutsvungunu, frozen in a death grimace. A note accompanying the pictures says the picture quality is bad because the photographer was shaking with fear.

Increasingly, Zimbabweans are going online and using cell phone text messages to share stories of life and death in a country where independent traditional media have been all but silenced, and from which reporters from most international media have been barred.

“Any organization or NGO working in the area of promotion of free expression is at risk,” Bev Clark, one of the founders of the Kubatana blogging forum, said by e-mail. “Zimbabwe is encased in fear.”

Harare-based Kubatana is a network of nonprofit organizations that runs a blogging forum. The forum relies on 13 bloggers in Zimbabwe, who e-mail submissions to an administrator who posts them to the site. The network also reaches beyond the Web by sending text messages to 3,800 subscribers.

Zimbabwe’s bloggers are mainly opposition activists whose themes range from HIV/AIDS to the country’s economic meltdown to President Robert Mugabe’s thuggery.

The underground networks can be forums for unsubstantiated rumor, but they also provide valuable independent information and can even make news.

In late June, the “This is Zimbabwe” blog started a letter-writing campaign against a German firm that was supplying paper for the sinking Zimbabwean dollar. After about a week, the international media picked up the story and the company, Giesecke & Devrient, announced it would stop dealing with Zimbabwe.

Another typical posting simply lists names of victims of political violence, each accompanied by one sentence on how the person was beaten to death.