This essay correlates a postcolonial and a postmodern novel, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, on the basis of their concern with issues of spirituality and (African) magic. Both novels aim at reconciling ‘ancient’ African knowledge and ‘modem’ Western achievements rather than casting these conditions as mutually exclusive or radically oppositional. This reconciliation of modernity and magic, tradition and technology, reflects a more pervasive shift in popular culture to spiritual issues since the 1960s which affected postmodern and postcolonial writing like­ wise. In view of pervasive experiences of alienation and fragmentation, these new spiritualities gain special significance as they promise new ways of meaning production and orientation.