Following World War II, Belgium’s colonial administration had been placed under United Nations trusteeship; it was to prepare Rwanda for eventual independence as a self-governing nation.
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It was the Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius (1810–1884) who restricted Hamitic to the non-Semitic languages in Africa, which are characterized by a grammatical gender system.
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According to Fleming, such anti-Hamitic ideology was originally born out of a desire to combat anti-Semitism and racism in general within academia during World War II.
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The League of Nations Mandate of 1916 appointed Belgium to govern Rwanda after Germany's defeat in World War I; Philip Gourevitch claims that “the terms Hutu and Tutsi had become clearly defined opposing “ethnic” identities, and the Belgians made this polarization the cornerstone of their colonial policy.
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In 1912, Carl Meinhof published Die Sprachen der Hamiten (The Languages of the Hamites) in which he expanded Lepsius's model, adding the Fula, Maasai, Bari, Nandi, Sandawe and Hadza languages to the Hamitic group.
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Alexander Winchell, a Professor of Paleontology and history author discussed the racial identity of the "dark race" of K.3364 in his work Pre-adamites (1880) from which he maintained the "dark race" were sunburnt Hamites of the Mediterranean race.