The Enemy Is You

 By Shine Esi Kwawukumey 

Cape Coast Castle 

The cold stone walls of Cape Coast Castle have seen centuries of betrayal, pain, and unimaginable cruelty. 

The story they tell is not just of European slave traders, but of the bitter truth that echoes through generations—that sometimes, the enemy is not who we think. 

African Slave Trade

In the deep, suffocating dungeons where thousands of Africans once lay shackled, waiting to be shipped off to a fate worse than death, there is a chilling realization. 

Africans had a hand in trading their own people for mere trinkets—sugar, mirrors, guns.

In those dark rooms, you can almost hear the ghosts whispering the painful reminder: The enemy is you.

News Writing and Reporting Students with our lecturer, Mr. Kofi Yeboah in the middle.

Centuries after this horrific chapter unfolded, the same air of sorrow and regret filled Cape Coast Castle once more as we, level 300 upper students from Wisconsin International University College’s School of Communication, stepped inside its weathered walls. 

We were on an educational trip as part of our News Writing and Reporting course, but this visit was more than an assignment. 

It was a confrontation with a past that no textbook could truly capture.

Entrance to the Male Slave Dungeons 

As we descended into the dungeons, the heavy smell of dampness and decay clung to the air. 

The guide’s voice wavered slightly as he told the story of how African kings and merchants—our own ancestors—traded their own people in exchange for guns and gunpowder, mirrors and alcohol. 

Standing in that oppressive darkness, it felt impossible to understand. 

How could they? 

How could we? 

And yet, it happened. 

Over and over again, lives were traded away for things that seem so trivial now.

The grave of the Governor’s wife 

The story became even darker when we learned of the European governor’s wife who, upon arriving at the castle, took her own life just two months later. 

She had discovered her husband’s affair with a black slave woman. 

The whispers of murder still hang over this story—some say she was killed by her husband’s mistress, a woman who held a different kind of power within those oppressive walls. 

But the real power struggle was happening elsewhere, it was within the African community itself, trading and betraying one another.

That betrayal was palpable and we could feel it in the coldness of the stones beneath our feet and in the weight of the stories being told around us. 

We weren’t just hearing about history anymore—we were feeling it, living it in a way that only Cape Coast Castle can make you do.

We stood before the “Door of No Return,” the final exit for enslaved Africans who had been sold to their fate. 

That door, once the last glimpse of home for so many, was also a reminder of how internal conflicts tore apart the African continent long before foreign forces stepped in. 

The enemy wasn’t just on the other side of the ocean—it was within and that truth hit hard, it was no longer a distant story of “them”—it was us.

The painful irony of the  headline—The Enemy Is You—became all too real. 

History had not only been shaped by foreign oppressors but by our own hands we had turned against each other. 

We had traded our own bloodlines for pieces of glass and metal, and that legacy of division is something that continues to haunt us today.

As we left the castle, the reality of the past weighed heavily on us. 

This wasn’t just an educational tour, this was a confrontation with the ghosts of our history—ghosts that still linger in the systems of inequality, poverty, and human trafficking that exist today. 

Slavery didn’t end with the closing of Cape Coast Castle’s doors, it has taken new forms. 

The betrayal continues in other ways, and the lesson of The Enemy Is You remains painfully relevant.

We, as students, were there to learn how to report the news, but what we took away was something far more significant—a deeper understanding of the complexities of our own past. 

The scars of history run deep, but so do the lessons they teach. 

Now, it is up to us, the next generation, to recognize that the enemy is not just out there, waiting to oppress us, sometimes, the enemy lies within.