The second Pan-African Psychiatric Conference was convened in Dakar, Senegal, from the 5th to the 9th of March, 1968, under the cochairmanship of Professor Henri Collomb, Professor of Neuropsychiatry, University of Dakar, and Professor T. A. Lambo, Professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Among the 230 participants in the conference less than ten had been present at the first Pan-African Psychiatric Conference which was held in Abeokuta, Nigeria, in 1961. The total number of participants at the second conference was far greater than that at the first, reflecting the rapid development of scientific interest in African psychiatry and the concomitant rapid increase of mental health facilities and psychiatric personnel working in Africa. Other differences between the two conferences were the exclusion of neurology from the program of the present conference and the extremely limited participation by British psychiatrists in the second pan-African conference, whereas the earlier conference had been largely dominated by the British school of neurology and psychiatry, prominently represented by Sir Aubrey Lewis and Lord Brain. The second Pan-African Psychiatric Conference, receiving as it did an important element of financial support from the French government through its technical assistance branch, was largely dominated by the French school of psychiatry. Senior French participants included Professor P. Castaigne, Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery at the University of Paris, and Professor Roger Bastide, Professor of Social Psychiatry at the Sorbonne.