KINSHASA, August 3, 2008 (AFP) - Thousands of Congolese packed into a stadium in the capital Kinshasa Sunday to pay their final respects to the country's best-known musician, Papa Wendo, who died on July 28 aged 83.

Among the mourners were senior government figures, parliamentarians, diplomats, artists, fellow musicians and ordinary Congolese.

Wendo, considered the father of Congolese rumba, had been a recording artist since the 1940s, but only found international fame as a world music star in more recent years.

'Wendo was a towering figure in modern music ... for decades he served our nation by producing musical works of the highest quality,' Esdras Kambale, culture minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, said in his tribute.

'He was a national treasure, a vibrant, extraordinary artist,' added Kinshasa Governor Andre Kimbuta Yango, calling him the 'reference point of Congolese music since the 1950s.'

Wendo's body was put on public view on the esplanade of the Martyrs Stadium during the service, where thousands of mourners, wearing T-shirts emblazoned with his image, paid their last respects.

He had died in a Kinshasa hospital of organ failure after a long illness.

Born Antoine Wendo Kolosoy in 1925 in the Bandundu region, northeast of Kinshasa, Papa Wendo was probably the country's most popular musician.

An orphan from a young age, he later became the father of 60 children, according to his family.

He was a boxer in the 1940s, fighting as far afield as Cameroon and Senegal, before making his first record in 1948.

He achieved notoriety with his international hit 'Marie-Louise,' to which the Congolese in the 1950s attributed the magic virtue of being able to wake the dead.

The Roman Catholic Church considered the tune to have Satanic properties, and at their behest, he ended up briefly behind bars.

Wendo was a friend of Patrice Lumumba, who led the country to independence from Belgium's colonial rule. After Lumumba's ousting and murder in 1961, Wendo withdrew from public life and stopped recording.

With the arrival to power of Laurent Kabila in 1997, Wendo -- who had fallen on hard times -- was rehabilitated, with the help of a large house, the use of a car and support for international travel for his touring and recording commitments.