From Colony to Ministry: The Circle That Never Broke
Portugal’s health minister turns a tragedy into an accusation, proving that the colonial gaze survives — even in a white coat.
When Portugal’s Minister of Health, Ana Paula Martins, said that Umo Cani — a Guinean woman who died with her baby after alleged medical negligence — came to Portugal for “health tourism,” she wasn’t just being callous. She was rehearsing an old colonial script.
Martins was born in Guinea-Bissau in 1965, at a time when the country was still under Portuguese occupation. The very fact of her birth there is a reminder of how Portugal once extended its power across continents, extracting labour, bodies, and lives. But decades later, from the safety of ministerial office, she now speaks of Africans as opportunists — as if the colonial order had never been reversed, only rebranded in bureaucratic language.
The irony is brutal. In 1965, her mother likely received medical assistance from a colonial health service meant to serve settlers and elites. That care allowed Ana Paula Martins to live. Yet in 2025, a Black woman seeking the same chance for her child is accused of abusing the system. History folds in on itself — only the power relations remain unchanged.
Across Portugal, maternity units are collapsing. Understaffed hospitals, overworked doctors, and chronic mismanagement have turned childbirth into a lottery.
In the last two years, women have given birth in ambulances, parking lots, and on highways because the nearest maternity ward was closed or redirecting emergencies. Midwives warn that tragedies like Umo Cani’s are not accidents but predictable outcomes of a failing system.
For a health minister to deflect blame onto a dead woman — and a migrant one — is not just cruel. It’s politically revealing. Instead of facing the decay of Portugal’s National Health Service, Martins reached for an easy scapegoat: the foreigner, the African, the “outsider.” Her remark turns negligence into nationalism, and public health into border control.
It also exposes how colonial mentality survives inside modern institutions. The language has changed, but the logic hasn’t: Portugal as the benevolent provider, Africans as ungrateful dependents.
There’s a cruel symmetry to it all. The daughter of empire, protected by the privileges of whiteness and elite education, now governs over the descendants of those her country once ruled. And when one of them dies in her care, she reaches for colonial vocabulary — not compassion.
Portugal likes to call itself a “bridge” between continents. But a bridge built on denial always collapses. Until leaders like Ana Paula Martins reckon with the histories that made them, the ghosts of empire will keep showing up — in hospital corridors, in political discourse, and in the silence that follows every preventable death.
