The term literacy mediators is widely used in research associated with the New Literacy Studies (NLS), now a major trend in reading and writing research in the Anglophone world and beyond. Literacy mediators, also referred to as scribes or brokers, are people who read and write for somebody else. The present article revisits data collected by the author as part of a wider study of reading and writing in everyday life conducted in Namibia in 1999 and 2000. Two cases in which the author herself acted as literacy mediator on behalf of a group of local tourism workers are analysed in detail. Both cases demonstrate the important role of literacy mediators in contexts of unequal social relationships and in situations where writing is inserted into previously oral exchanges. They show that writing for others can take various forms depending on the degree of involvement of both parties. Literacy mediation, the article concludes, is a common cross-cultural practice. It can be seen as a distributed resource that complements individual literacy.