On Thursday, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission handed over its report to the country's President, Nelson Mandela.

The 3,500-page report was the culmination of two and a half years of public hearings and investigations, of taking statements from 20,000 victims of abuses committed during the apartheid era, of working through some of the more than 7,000 applications for amnesty for crimes committed during white rule.

Just hours before the handover ceremony the governing African National Congress and the last white president FW De Klerk went to court to try to block the report's unpleasant findings against them.

The day had been long anticipated and planned to perfection. The Truth Commission's examination of a violent and dehumanised history, its attempt to build a new morality in South Africa, was to be laid out on paper and presented in an elaborate ceremony in Pretoria.

The Commission's chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu intended it to be a day of mourning - but of celebration too - a magic moment where the country turned its back on the past and looked at a blueprint for the future.

Plans for the big day

As with all such events, my own more modest planning operation had gone into action. The satellite dishes were on the roof of the building where the report's handover to President Mandela was to take place - where the choirs were going to sing - and where an often emotional Archbishop Tutu was likely to shed a tear or two.

The naming of names - of those found responsible for gross violations of human rights - was to be done early in the morning.

Journalists were to be locked into a room for six hours from dawn with copies of the report's five volumes and told to start looking. That would be the on-the-day coverage.

But in the weeks beforehand I read thousands of words about the Commission's work and interviewed some of the victims of violence who had looked to it for help.

It was their faces and their stories I remembered in the eventual chaos of the day.

Legal challenges change the story

The legal challenges to the report's findings turned into the story - the courts and the reporters stayed up through the night before the handover ceremony - an event which despite all the planning - nearly didn't happen.

My carefully laboured-over reports of the victims struggling to carry on their lives in South Africa's townships were overtaken by events and didn't get on air.

But it's a little like Archbishop Tutu himself says - it's the processing of listening to the truth, of looking the beast in the eye - which has been most important.

I had almost dreaded actually handling the report - the frantic scrambling through the volumes of dry tightly-spaced type to find the most important parts to report. To digest the words and the years of evil and suffering and regurgitate them under deadline pressure.

But from the heavy volumes, the words, the stories of the people I had interviewed jumped out - their wounds ran raw from the pages.

Soweto tragedy

Here in volume three was Sylvia Dhlomo. I had sat in her tiny house in Soweto not long ago - looking at photographs of her murdered student activist son, Siselo.

On the walls, pictures of township heroes - Nelson Mandela, Winnie, the young leader Chris Hani - gunned down by right-wing white racists on the eve of South Africa's transition to democracy.

I had watched Sylvia break down when she testified before the Commission, and again when we went to Siselo's grave in Soweto's Avalon cemetary.

He was 19 when he was shot in the head - by, Sylvia always believed, whites from the apartheid security forces.

The Truth Commission's report will break Sylvia Dhlomo's heart again. A black man from the ANC's armed wing has asked the Commission for amnesty. He killed Siselo - in the belief that he was an informer.

For Sylvia, it may be harder than ever to find reconciliation out of this truth.

Boipatong massacre

And on another page - the stories of the victims of the Boipatong massacre, killed by a hit squad from the Inkatha Freedom Party - blacks armed by the apartheid government.

I spent last week with the survivors and the families of the victims.

Miriam Molete lost her husband - her four year old daughter Mitta had her head split open with a machete. She's in a wheelchair now.

And another story on another page - Paul Kupane, who lost his leg in an attack at an ANC funeral vigil.

Hopping on his crutches, he sprinkled chicken feed in the front yard of his home in the township of Sebokeng last week, as we talked.

Paul once had a budding career as a professional golfer. Now, he's given his trophies and his clubs away to a friend. His artificial leg doesn't give him the balance he needs to tee off.

Voices of the people

I was surprised by how much this encyclopaedia of apartheid moved me as I held it in my hand. By how much it has given voices to these people and many more.

I'm disappointed too that the Truth Commission has failed - for now - to bring to justice the key architects who built the white state.

It may still do so - if its recommendations for gross violations for human rights are followed up.

For some South Africans, the process has paved the first sections of the road to reconciliation - a road which will realistically take generations to build.

But, despite the achievements of the Commission, the bitterness which surrounded the release of its findings reveals all too clearly how far South Africa has to travel.