A long conflict in Namibia was resolved successfully by a mediation process that enabled a de facto colony to become a sovereign state via an internationally supervised election. This article reconsiders the relationship between conflict mediation and decolonisation in this particular case, which, while in many ways sui generis, nevertheless permits us to extract some general lessons. We show how case confidence-building measures were applied, how mediating agencies used different pressures, and how important it was that all the parties to the conflict ‘owned’ the process.