LET'S get serious, for once. Last week South Africans saw the very worst possible savage barbarism visited on a couple of young women on the East Rand.

Long story short: the women took up jobs vacated by people who had been fired for going on an illegal strike at the OR Tambo International Airport.

They were apparently ambushed and caught by a bunch of yahoos on a train, stripped starkers and their clothes thrown out of the window.

Someone with a phone camera snapped away and the pictures ended up on the front page of a tabloid.

Now savagery does not go beyond that. The pity of it all is that if our past record is anything to go by, the perpetrators will never be arrested, let alone have their day in court and be convicted.

Anywhere in the civilised world, there would be a national outcry. But we are inured to barbarism, it seems.

Why the heck are our alleged leaders and the trade union movement not outraged, I can never tell.

What I can tell is, if this is "comradeship", I am no comrade and I want nothing to do with it.

But then we are a nation that invented the "necklace", a Stone Age act through which alleged collaborators with apartheid had a car tyre thrown around their necks, doused with petrol and then set alight.

As they kicked and gasped their last breath, young "comrades" chanted freedom songs next to the gory spectacle.

I personally know of no instance where the "guilt" of a necklace victim was proved before they were killed.

In my area, the Vaal, the buried remains of "sell-outs" were exhumed because "comrades" did not want them in our local cemeteries.

There is the well-known horrific story of a "sellout" who was decapitated, and his head stuck on a post atop his house chimney. Our people cheered with euphoria at this grotesque display of "bravery".

When a councillor was attacked in Sharpeville and his house and car set alight, he tried to escape but was caught and shoved under the inferno of his burning vehicle.

The perpetrators of the heinous deed became local heroes.

The police have not told us if there has been any progress in investigating who stripped the women naked on the train.

But several people who called a radio talk show suggested that the attack bore the hallmarks of women-on-women violence.

This being women's month, I hope it is not so.

We are enjoined to be good to them, and one would hope that they would at least be nice to one another.

I can never forget, though, the worst attack on a woman I have ever witnessed - a woman destroying another woman to smithereens in public. And loving it.

She did not clobber her with a haymaker left hook like I have seen men do to women. In fact, she never touched her.