{"id":78898,"date":"2026-09-15T07:07:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T05:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/?p=78898"},"modified":"2026-09-10T14:30:24","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T12:30:24","slug":"ancestral-technologies-and-eternal-extractivism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/en\/magazine\/ancestral-technologies-and-eternal-extractivism\/","title":{"rendered":"Ancestral technologies and eternal extractivism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bonk\u00f3 \u00f1\u00e1nkue<\/em> is a Creole ritual that combines dance, performance, song, and percussion. This tradition originated in Fernando Poo (Bioko) from the encounter between slaves brought to the island by British colonists between 1827 and 1843 who formed an \u201cemancipated\u201d society known as the Fernandinos, and the Abaku\u00e1 \u00d1\u00e1\u00f1igos who were deported from Cuba by the Spanish Crown from 1862 until the end of the same century. From this encounter was born the syncretic fusion called \u00d1i\u00f1ingo \u00d1\u00e1nkue<\/em>, and this fusion raises the question that runs throughout this article, namely: How do Afro-descendant traditions create their own survival strategies?<\/p>\n

The direct origin of this phenomenon lies in the Abaku\u00e1 Brotherhood founded around 1836 in Cuba by people of the Efik nation deported from Calabar who transformed their rituals, traditions, dances and songs into a new cultural expression based on body and performative actions. They concealed their myths within Roman Catholic dogma, embroideried their secrets in vibrant patterns, and hid their messages within the movements of their dances. This technology, inherited from the Ekpe society (a hermetic cultural tradition brought by the Efik from their homeland) not only allowed for cultural preservation, unlike other enslaved communities whose identities and cults disappeared into oblivion, but also made them the most representative Afro-descendant religion of the time. After gaining power, they began to intimidate institutions and governing bodies by transforming their community\u2019s ritual society into a guarantee of employment and protection.<\/p>\n

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In response, the colonial repression unleashed by the Spanish Crown and the Cuban Creole elites was relentless, associating \u00d1a\u00f1iguismo<\/em> with violent crime, witchcraft, and an \u201cevil lifestyle.\u201d However, neither arrests, murders, nor exile to prison islands in Africa managed to extinguish Abaku\u00e1 as a religious and cultural identity.<\/p>\n

The Bonk\u00f3<\/em> \u00d1\u00e1nkue<\/em><\/strong> was born precisely from this punitive deportation, as the very bodies expelled from Cuba reconstructed, on the island of exile and within the Fernandina community,\u00a0 social and ritual continuity. Exile did not destroy their cultural technology, instead it transplanted it, and with this forced dispacement something new was born.<\/p>\n

Within this context, this article traces a genealogy of bodies that crossed the Black Atlantic, a term coined by Paul Gilroy who proposed thinking of Black diasporic identity not as a fixed root (a pure origin to which to return) but as a route of transatlantic circulation. Thus, we can connect these African ritual practices with traditional Black and queer resistance that emerged in the 20th-century American urban context within two urban cultures, namely, Detroit techno and Harlem ballroom-voguing, both of which were subjected to similar hostile ecosystems. In this text, we attempt to understand how these cultures have managed to survive and preserve their practices through transformation and innovation.<\/p>\n

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Techno Was Not Born in Berlin<\/strong><\/p>\n

Techno was born in the early 1980s in Detroit, in the suburbs of Belleville, and more specifically, at the hands of Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, collectively known as the Belleville Three. At that time, Detroit was a city devastated by deindustrialization, racial segregation, and institutional neglect, so much so that the automotive industry, which had defined the city\u2019s Black working-class identity, was on the verge of collapse. Violence, economic collapse, and the community\u2019s despair became the thematic raw material of Detroit’s sound, and this landscape of ruin directly shaped the industrial and desolate character that defined the city\u2019s imagery.<\/p>\n

Within this landscape of ruins, these three Black teenagers synthesized the possibilities of Black electronic technology and Afrofuturist, speculative, and Afrodiasporic practices to imagine a sonic fiction for world-building, sound as a way of imagining possible futures with bodies invalidated by a social circumstances[1]<\/sup><\/a>Dan Sicko, Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk, 1999.<\/em><\/span><\/span>