African Diaspora? Who are they?

Outside of the Africa are large numbers of Africans who simply do not know who they are. I know this because I am to some extent one of them. However, (while trying not to appear better than anybody else), I feel that I have gained an understanding that is greater than the average African in the Diaspora. Particularly more than those Africans from similar backgrounds as myself. For those who do not know, I am a young black African man, who was born in the UK.  I would have you to know by the way that simply defining myself in this way, is a subject of intense controversy, but yet it is an obvious reality that I will explain in detail.
It is perhaps surprising that I hold this sense of an African identity, as it was far from made explicit in school, society and in my family. In fact, my grandparents have never been to Africa, and I am the only family member to have stepped foot on the continent. This is largely because all my Grandparents were born in Jamaica, and feel little affinity with the African continent. This lack of identification with Africa is nothing new, but it has been passed on from generation to generation since the first black slave arrived in Jamaica and underwent a ‘seasoning process’. My ancestors were truly psychology ‘seasoned’,  and I  am one of many who have reaped the fruits of their forced ignorance.
My ignorance reached to the point that at school I did not even know I was African. On the contrary, as black children we used to tease each other by calling eachother Ethiopian, Kenyan or even African. To call a black person in my school African (where almost all the black children were of Caribbean descent), was a serious insult. To us, to be African was to be poor, skinny, suffering, ugly and uneducated. Well this was the only image of Africa we saw on the television, and it perpetuated within our psyche, and we then concluded that this was not us, it was them.
Sadly, to this very day this notion of being black but not African still pervades. These ideas of self are not limited to uninformed school teenagers, but rather it is a widespread feeling within the African -Caribbean Diaspora community. In Britain, the very identification of our African identity was hidden from us even in Ethnic Diversity forms. We were called ‘Afro-Caribbean’s’, our sense of our African self was purposely hidden, through the denial of the  word African. I remember asking my Aunt in my early teenage years what the word Afro meant, and she could not provide me with a comprehensive answer. This is because she did not know the true meaning herself. This shows us that this severe lack of knowledge of self-identity amongst the diaspora has proceeded from generation to generation. It was there long before my Grandparents were born, who are heading towards there 90th Birthday. This lack of self-knowledge amongst the Diaspora is not a natural phenomenon, nor is it modern.