Baganda Milk Jug with Native Repair

A strip of metal stitched down the side like a zipper.

Baganda craftsmen of Uganda, East Africa, carved this wooden vessel in the 20th century, and its repair was made by hand in aluminum. Wooden milk containers are commonly found across the region’s pastoral communities. Here a column of small overlapping aluminum plates runs from shoulder to base, pinned along the join of a long crack. The form is a stout bottle with a short rim, and the wood is a warm, mottled honey-brown with a soft, rubbed surface.

About 14 inches tall. Reads as sculpture on a sideboard, with the scar front and center.