At the end of the first week of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's hearings, in April 1996, Archbishop Desmond Tutu told a packed hall: "Very few of us can be the same today as we were on Monday. We are engaged in a very serious thing. It is the healing of our land."
This week, the chairman of the unique body which, through 20,000 statements of victims of apartheid, threw open the door on 34 years of history which brutalised South Africa, made it clear that the healing was by no means complete. Archbishop Tutu said: "We are facing the truth. It's going to be horrible. Reconciliation is going to be painful."
No one in the still-divided South Africa pretends that either truth or reconciliation has been achieved. But after two and a half years of being led through collective therapy by the man known as "the Arch", South Africa has laid bare for all time the extent of human cruelty and perhaps spared itself some historical lies.
Whether South Africans will confront the horrible truth and the painful process of reconciliation is not clear.
This week the Justice Minister, Mr Dullah Omar, said the task of reconciliation "is not just the job of the commission.
"We must not institutionalise the process of reconciliation within the TRC. That is not its function. Reconciliation is the duty of every South African."
Mr Dumisa Ntsebeza, a black human rights lawyer who heads investigations at the TRC, felt the commission had allowed South Africans a measure of informed forgetfulness. "Even before I came into the commission I had already begun to say that things that had happened in the past, however bad they had been, were not issues that I wanted to influence me."
He said "no one in the commission can ever ask any of the victims to forgive. We can only hope to get to a stage where they will reconcile themselves with living in a future in which things are not what they have been in the past."
Within the TRC - set up as part of a pact in exchange for a peaceful transition to democracy - there have been rows and divisions, including of a racial nature.
Mr Paul van Zyl, a lawyer for the commission, said: "Among the staff, there were whites and blacks, some sympathetic to the National Party, some who had been tortured, and so very often we got bogged down in tiny issues. It was a microcosm of what was happening in South Africa."
But another commissioner, Dr Faizel Randera, said the commission had a duty to lead by example.
He said: "Jobs were advertised and management would give them to a white or Indian person and this would raise some people's hackles. At the time I said: `Hey, we've conducted the interviews and got the best person.' In retrospect, we could have spent more on training people - the TRC would have served as a model."
The commission nevertheless played a role in confronting whites with their apartheid track record. Their response to revelations about human rights abuses was often `we did not know'.
Ms Isabel Cilliers, a white, Cape Town-based Afrikaans-English interpreter for the commission, said: "We can no longer say we did not know. If that is all the TRC has achieved, it has been worth it."
Yet a certain truth fatigue seems to have developed among whites and young black South Africans.
"White people have become thoroughly bored by the whole question. It is a defensive boredom, but people have switched off," said Mr David Welsh, a former anti-apartheid activist and political analyst.
Mr Welsh said that, if anything, the TRC has broadened racial divisions. "If the object of the commission was to achieve reconciliation, it has not worked. There has not been an adequate airing of the `let the other side be heard' principle in the Truth Commission. That has galled many whites, including myself, who have a long and honourable record of opposing apartheid."
Others insist that the TRC cannot possibly be judged now. "A process of reflection and change has begun. It may last a decade," said Dr Tom Lodge, professor of political science at Wits University, Johannesburg.
"The moral lesson to be drawn from the Truth Commission is not how wicked the Afrikaners were . . . but rather how do we stop this happening again," he said.
Few people are able to offer a post-Truth Commission vision, but they agree with Mr Ntsebeza's view that the future healing process must not be institutionalised. Meanwhile, lack of funding means that school history, geography and literature syllabuses in many cases have not changed.
Archbishop Tutu has retained the last word. Because he is the nation's conscience, it is what South Africans of all hues hang on to. "Whatever it is that impelled us to go down this road [of creating a Truth Commission], it is something we will constantly be wanting to say thank you for."