Brother Man is a novel by Roger Mais

Roger Mais

Roger Mais was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. By 1951, Mais had won ten first prizes in West Indian literary competitions...

, about a Messianic folk Rastafarian healer, 'Bra' Man' (in dialect) John Power. The plot follows the superstructure of Christ's story , with other characters resembling Mary Magdelene etc. The book is extremely significant as it is the first serious representation of the Rastafari movement

Rastafari movement

The Rastafari movement or Rasta is a new religious movement that arose in the 1930s in Jamaica, which at the time was a country with a predominantly Christian culture where 98% of the people were the black descendants of slaves. Its adherents worship Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia , as God...

in literature , and Roger Mais foresaw the defining power of the Rasta movement to Jamaican society 20 years before the era of Bob Marley and Reggae mainstream.

It is also significant as an exploration of life in the Jamaican Ghetto, and how the people relate to their leaders , making them deities and throwing them away when they fail to entertain them.
The novel is written in prose with a layout that is seemingly cinematic and episodic , little is done to describe the environment beyond the claustrophobic ghetto of ' The Lane' in the slums of Kingston, Jamaica