From “An Army of One’s Own,” which appeared in the February 1997 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 174-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive.

Eeben Barlow lives on a quiet, tree-lined side street in a wealthy suburb of Pretoria, the city that was once the headquarters of South Africa’s apartheid military establishment. Set behind well-tended grounds and a swimming pool, guarded by surveillance cameras and stone lions at the portico, Barlow’s stately mock-Tudor villa could easily belong to a corporate exec in Greenwich, Connecticut. His interior design would make Martha Stewart…