Grit your teeth, this 'tasty' DRC menu may disgust

Monkey meat on display in a Kinshasa market; the demand is very high among residents for game meat.

KINSHASA: Anything from tortoise, snake and monkey meat is a mouth-watering delicacy that goes on the menu in Democratic Republic of Congo. That may sound nauseating, to East Africans, but Congolese have experimented with so much bush meat that it has become part of them.

Yet it comes at a deadly cost. Last year, it cost them 49 lives when a rural bush hunter in Jeera, about 1,000km north of Kinshasa stumbled upon a dead monkey. It became part of the family dinner. Days later, the hunter, his wife and children were dead. Medical personnel who attended to them died later as well. It was the beginning of another Ebola outbreak in DRC.