Hello!
The passage above reinforces the idea that the District Commissioner is trying to negotiate a treaty.
This is a fragment from the book written by Chinua Achebe called "Thing Fall Apart". In this book, the author writes about live in Nigeria under colonialism. The fragment is about one time when the natives burned a church, and the District Commissioner called them to assess the situation. In the passage just before the fragment, the Commissioner is telling that his administration was peaceful, and the tone of the fragment is conciliatory, so that suggests that the District Commissioner was looking for a peaceful solution.
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