With the coming of independence, ethnopsychiatry had to change. The first step in this direction was the professionalization of European psychiatry in Africa, marked by conferences held in Bakuva in 1958 and in Abeokuta in 1961. The Bakuva conference was the first time that psychiatrists from throughout the continent were brought together to discuss their professional concerns. At Abeokuta there were representatives from twenty-two countries, and funding came from a variety of sources including the omnipresent drug manufacturers Ciber–Geigy and Roche. The conferences were important in helping to establish the credentials of psychiatry among the other, better-known and better-funded medical disciplines. They also opened the way for a revaluation of orthodoxies and for research into hitherto-overlooked subjects such as indigenous modes of diagnosis and treatment. In the foreword to the report from Bakuva there is an overview of the challenges facing psychiatry on the continent, migratory labour being singled out as particularly important. Professor Sir Aubrey Lewis's inaugural address at the Abeokuta conference pointed to a number of problems facing African societies and noted that social change, depriving many individuals of a sense of purpose, would lead to anxiety and insecurity. In passing, he observed that there was no evidence suggesting that mental illness in the African differed markedly from that found in the European. This issue was, of course, not so easily resolved, and over the coming decades research continued into the epidemiology of mental disorders in the sub-Saharan region.