Union (ICU) even establishing a section in Southern Rhodesia. The Southern Rhodesian ICU developed a substantial rural base, responding to the question of land rights with the policy of a union ownership scheme, aiming to establish a "collective, de-colonised and decommodified working class and black ownership". Although the ICU dissolved in the early 1930s, the South Rhodesian section continued to operate as the Reformed Industrial Commercial Union until the 1950s, when the region was incorporated into the Central African Federation. Following the Rhodesian Bush War, trade union activity rapidly increased, bringing with it an increase in strikes and industrial disputes, even against the wishes of ZANU-PF. The new government responded by breaking up the strikes, suppressing and taking over existing trade unions, revoking union control of wage negotiations and instituting the party appointment of union officials. From a merger of six trade union centres, ZANU-PF established the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), aiming to reduce industrial disputes and increase the influence that the government had over the trade union movement. But by 1987, unions again began to establish their independence from ZANU-PF, to which the government responded with police terror. The government even began to lose control over ZCTU, which increasingly criticized government policy surrounding trade unionism, eventually outright opposing the government due to its neoliberal economic policies, corruption and authoritarianism, going on to form an alliance of opposition groups which became the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). However, the MDC soon strayed from its working class base, taking on a reformist and liberal-conservative party line, instituted by a middle class leadership. Dissilusionment with the MDC led to libertarian socialism emerging from the opposition movement, with some Zimbabwean anarchists establishing the Uhuru Network to organise amongst working class communities. With the outbreak of the 2016–2017 Zimbabwe protests, Zimbabwean anarchists characterized the protest movement as representing a new society based on "solidarity, equality, grassroots democracy, free of all forms of oppression", identifying it with the anarchist approach to a bottom-up struggle against the state. In the wake of the 2017 Zimbabwean coup d'état, in which Emmerson Mnangagwa seized power from Robert Mugabe as part of a power struggle within ZANU-PF, Zimbabwean anarchists offered an anti-state perspective for the future of Zimbabwe, proposing mass action as a means to build libertarian socialism. There has since been movements to develop a specific anarchist organisation in Zimbabwe, in the hopes of forming a