The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of distinction between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.
-- Sir William Francis Butler
During the 20th century the centre of the world shifted. The dramatic alterations in political power have corrected the vision of a European-centered world. Where the centres of European culture flourished, decayed and sprouted in turn, empires in Africa rose, ruled, resisted and succumbed. Much of Africa's past has now been excavated from ignorance and error, revealing a rich and previously little known human heritage.