Kisangani - Demographics

Demographics

During its first century, Kisangani grew at a rate that ranked among the fastest growing in the Belgian Congo. Within the span of forty years, the city's population grew from slightly under 15,018 to over 121, 765 by 1958. By the close of the 20th century, Kisangani was the third largest city in Zaire, and the largest of the cities that existed in the Orientale province. Within thirty-three years of Zairieanastion, the population had tripled to over 600,000, and reached its highest ever-recorded population of 672, 739 for the 2003 census.

The population is ethnically diverse and is changing rapidly, especially in large cities such as Kisangani, so it is not always easy to get an exact picture of the ethnic origin of all the population from census statistics. The last census in 2003 counted almost 672 739 inhabitants in the city of Kisangani. Lubunga is the town's most populous but least dense with 115 775 inhabitants while Mangobo with 98 434 inhabitants is the most dense.

Demography has evolved as follows since colonial times:

Kisangani is the most populous city of the Northern provinces in the RDC, with an estimated 2008 population of 1,200,000 (up from 406,249 thousand in 1993).This amounts to about more than half the population of the northern regional population lives in the province of Tshopo. Over the last decade the city's population has been increasing.