House of the rising Mzanzi

South African house artists Culoe De Song and Black Coffee are grooving the globe, from Miami clubs.

Disco died on a baseball pitch in Illinois - or so they thought at the time. Three decades after its mutant offspring, house music, rose from the ashes of the hustle in a Chicago warehouse the sensual thump is still alive. And nowhere is it thumping deeper than in Alex, half a planet from the Great Lakes, where scooters and Lamborghinis are mounting pavements outside Joe's chesa nyama. Come Sundays, it's a haven for house-heads.

You could argue that South Africa has hijacked what Frankie Knuckles began with two turntables and a razor blade. Because today in the US, hip-hop reigns - but here, house is king.

Ours is a unique territory, where a sound that hasn't left the garages in many countries is as mainstream as pop: where a house album can outsell Coldplay or Beyoncé. It isn't just club music for us, one kid tells me. "Here, house is our daily bread."

Sniffing the scent, the Ultra Music Festival, a mega dance event, came to our shores last month, hot on the heels of international house artists - German DJ Ralf Gum even immigrated. They make a lot more dosh and get more gigs, says Allan Nicoll, a suit at local house label Soul Candi when he's not DJing as Kid Fonque.

But we have our own superstars - Mi Casa's latest album, Su Casa, went platinum within three months. Enough for Soul Candi, which began as a record store that sold only 5% local music, to overhaul its business.

We're routinely on the top 10 on global download portal, Traxsource. "South African house music is a huge international success, OK?" top DJ Louie Vega tells me from New York. "You hear it in clubs everywhere."

We're sizzling in Mediterranean climes - hotspots for house chills - particularly Greece and Portugal. But then there's also London, Paris, Tokyo. Ask George Mothiba, who formed Revolution more than a decade ago with his twin, Joseph: "Our crowds are multicultural," he says. "The house boys never cared about beefs. We don't behave like hooligans."

You hear the critics now. House music? That vacuous mumbo-jumbo? George guffaws. "If 30000 people are dancing to your music, then you gotta keep your mouth shut."

While our flavours run the gamut from Durban's punchy grooves to the piano-sweet melodies you'll hear in Pretoria's House 22, from deep house to vocal house and our very own tribal cocktail "Afro house", our signature is that raw African drum and heavy bass that throbs in the soles of your feet.

When you hear our house, you know it.

"Other producers want to make those types of beats," says Vega, who adds that Daft Punk's Grammy coup with the soulful Get Lucky showed an industry trend towards our "warm" summer-day groove.

Many credit Black Coffee's meteoric rise overseas, fast-tracked by Superman with local R&B lass Bucie, for ushering in a new wave of lethal young things, from Nastee Nev to Shimza and Uhuru.

I meet Culoe De Song - who scooped Best Male Artist at the Metro FM Awards last Saturday - at a Joburg studio. A girl in teeny shorts rattles off his schedule. "Cape Town next week, then Paris, then Amsterdam ..."

As a kid, he tuned into late-night shows with a radio he found on a dump. Now Culoe (born Culolethu Zulu) pulls huge crowds here and in Europe - a quandary easily solved by spending half the year abroad. If he's not playing his tracks, someone else is. "It's impossible to keep up with every DJ in the world who plays my music." German label Innervisions snapped him up and he had releases in Japan, all before his 24th birthday. No doubt his mentor, Coffee, gave him some pointers on world domination.

Culoe found his sweet spot by fusing electronic beats with the soundtrack of his KwaZulu-Natal upbringing - from Shembe church chants to maskandi. "The mids and the treble must sound fat, yeah," he says, punching keys on his iPad. In Webaba, Busi Mhlongo's voice explodes around us in a highveld electric storm of violas, and it's haunting and beautiful and you don't know whether to weep or dance.

Our house hits that sample heavyweights like Jimmy Dludlu, Thandiswa Mazwai and Philip Tabane showed it was possible to recast our musical armory as club music. Fresh acts like Black Motion, who rose to fame mixing beats in a Soshanguve mkhukhu, use traditional instruments in "a new wave" that turns the DJ set into a performance.

There's influence from forebears, but Culoe says he's part of a whole new era. "I'm from the 'bedroom-producer generation'. They probably don't know who Beethoven was and don't care. We love making beats from a computer." They're hurtling forward, putting this stuff "on steroids".

"What we started is evolving," says Oskido who, luckily, was lousy at making hotdogs and better at making music. He was a godfather of the sound, along with people like Vinny Da Vinci and DJ Christos. Back in the early '90s, the boerie-roll-seller-turned-music-mogul snuck into Hillbrow's Club Razzmatazz, slowing down international house records. "In Europe, they're kinda doing aerobics on the dance floor. Here people like to get down," says Christos. And so kwaito - in some ways a precursor of SA house - was born.

"When Chris Hani was killed, I was playing in Tembisa and someone said, maybe it's not a good idea for you to go there as a white person. I said 'bullshit'."

In a coffee shop, Oskido adjusts his cap and orders a side of honey. "In '94, we realised we couldn't sing political songs anymore. People wanted to forget that. So we wrote about things in the townships, but using tsotsitaal with a party beat so you wouldn't get bored." It was music for the people. "They held it and said: 'This is ours.'"

Barring Bra Hugh, who said, "OK ja no fine," when asked to blow the trumpet on Zabalaza, traditional artists turned up their noses. "They told us: 'You guys are vulgar.'" After one sexy Boom Shaka rendition, he got called into the principal's office. "Madiba gave us a tongue-lashing. 'You can't mess with the national anthem.' We didn't understand. We were young people expressing ourselves."

He knocked on the door of every record label. They said: What are you smoking, pal? Kwaito died in a boardroom in Jozi. Or so they thought.

Oskido took to selling cassettes from his car boot at taxi ranks and campuses. "That's when the fire started." By the time the labels sent him roses, it was too late. "I said: 'What do you want?' We had the power now."

Another pioneer, Greg Maloka, tells me: "We saw the trend that to be big at home you have to be big elsewhere. So we thought, no problem. Let's go make it big."

No, no, you can't sell kwaito overseas, they said. People won't understand the language. "I said: 'We've been singing to French and Latin songs all our lives'. You had to drag them kicking and screaming."

From sneaking into Miami penthouse parties because they didn't have passes, they were "the kings" when Mafikizolo's Loot got traction from the Sunshine State to the Big Apple. "Everyone went mad. I saw French girls, Japanese girls, jumping around. That's when I thought we can conquer the world musically, you know?"

Now the South African parties are the biggest in Miami, he says. The others are kinda dead. "How you know you've made it in the States is when your cab driver says: 'Ay man, you from South Africa? You guys are big here. Listen, listen.' And he plays you a song."

How house music went commercial here in a way that defied global trends also has to do with a law school drop-out. It was arguably the first regular house feature on prime-time radio in the country, says DJ Fresh of his YFM slot, The Mad Half Hour, which, like Chicago's Hot Mix 5 in the '80s, had house DJs battling on air.

When YFM launched in '97, few stations played house here - and then only as a side order to soul and R&B. Yet it was booming in the township. "We weren't a bunch of kids from China trying to programme a radio station in Alaska. We were Gauteng kids doing a station for Gauteng," says Maloka, then the GM.

They wanted to break certain myths. For one: "House isn't the devil's music that only plays at night. It's the most spiritual, inspiring music ever. Some of the most beautiful love songs are house songs."

They threw huge parties in upmarket spots. "Stuff that had never been done for black youth before. It wasn't about a trend, but about freedom. That's what created a loyalty second to none."

At six months, they were on more than one million listeners. "People started demanding the music, and we realised there was a gap in the market," says Fresh, now a regular at Ibiza where our music gets as much love from other DJs. "Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined people dancing to Heavy-K in Ibiza as they would to any other song."

Without a doubt, radio's support explains why the genre has thrived here, he says. "Across stations, more house music is played than any other genre in the country, and on Top 40 radio, which is something to brag about. In many countries, you only hear it on specialist shows." Vega, on his first of many trips here, was gobsmacked. "You're telling me you play house music on the radio?"

He tells me: "I love the way house is seen in South Africa. I wish it was like that around the world. I couldn't believe it when I first went there and the kids were, like, 16 to 20. Anything that has youth appeal, forget it. It goes mainstream."

By contrast, house listeners in the States, the birthplace of the genre, are middle-aged, says Maloka. "We'd changed that because we made it a very cool sound." Ask any township kid what they want to be when they grow up and they'll say: a DJ. Another Culoe.

When top dogs from Lagos to the States phone you to do a collaboration, that's big, says Maloka, who, in his swish corner office, props his shoe on the boardroom table to tie his shoelace. "It's a South African success story. The first were the Hughs and Miriams. And then there was nothing. And then there was house."