ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the meaning of the technical or aesthetic qualities of the casting for the owner as a supposed 'historical record' and considers it and other ikegobo as ritual objects in the context of the Benin Cult of the Hand. Ezomo Omoruyi explains the bronze ikegobo in terms of the story of Ehenua and Akenzua I. In considering Ezomo's ikegobo as a historical record we must take care to distinguish its significance for the owner from the value that it may have for the historian. The European figures remain an interesting problem for there is a distinct possibility that Europeans took a hand in the internal conflicts of the Benin Kingdom in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The cult object known as ikega or ikenga is found, in various forms, over a wide area of the central part of southern Nigeria.
