Tutsis, being primarily pastoralists, had a more valuable place in Rwandan society than the agriculturalist Hutu, and the hunter-gatherer and potter Twa.
More significantly, the Belgian administration feared the rise of communism and a pan-African socialist regime led by Congo-Léopoldville's Patrice Lumumba.
Then-Belgian High Resident Guy Logiest set up the first democratic elections in Rwanda to avoid more radical politics.
Hutu radicals, working with his group (and later against it), adopted the Hamitic hypothesis, portraying the Tutsi as outsiders, invaders, and oppressors of Rwanda.
In 1973, general and defense minister Juvénal Habyarimana, an ethnic Hutu supported by more radical northern Rwandans, overthrew Kayibanda and had him and his wife apparently killed under house arrest.
[citation needed] With economic conditions difficult, and threatened by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invasion, Habyarimana turned to inflaming ethnic tensions.
Hassan Ngeze, an entrepreneur recruited by the government to combat the Tutsi publication Kanguka, created and edited Kangura, a radical Hutu Power newsletter.
The repetition of Hutu Ten Commandments was an attempt to incite and mobilize the population to commit genocide against the Tutsi, who were portrayed as threatening the social and political order achieved since independence, and as envisioned by the Akazu.
[11] Following Habyarimana's assassination, an act that at the time people speculated was done by Tutsi extremists, Hutu Power forces mobilized militia, most notably Interahamwe, and mobs to carry out the mass killings of the Rwandan genocide.