Nkosinathi Maphumulo is an award-winning songwriter, DJ, and record producer from South Africa known as DJ Black Coffee. He’s also now a Christian, as a near-death experience on an airplane to Argentina led him to take up his cross and follow Christ. Such is what Maphumulo told radio personality Thabo Mokwele during a recent interview.
As background, Maphumulo’s near-death experience came when he was on a plane from Brazil to Mar del Plata Airport in Argentina in mid-January 2024. However, the plane suffered a mishap and had to make a hard, emergency landing at Uruguay’s capital of Montevideo. During the hard landing, Maphumulo suffered multiple injuries and had to undergo a spinal chord surgery and then stay in a hospital for a week to recover.
Explaining to Mokwele what happened during the flight and how it impacted him, Maphumulo said that he was taking a nap and woke up to a gospel song playing through his headphones as the plane shook violently and crashed, leading him to feel like “angels were singing to save” him.
He said, the Christian Post reports, “I put on my headphones and took a nap, but I was woken up by what seemed like a dream or nightmare. The plane was shaking extremely violently. … I fell on the floor and I still had my headphones. There was a gospel song playing, and there was this song playing ‘hallelujah, hallelujah’ in a loop, and the loop kept getting higher and higher. It felt like a choir or these angels were singing to save me at that moment.”
Continuing, Maphumulo explained that when he thought he would die, he begged God not to send him to Hell and that now he feels like he has been given a second chance in life, saying, “I saw my life ending. I wasn’t even praying to be alive, I was just praying to get to Heaven. I was like, ‘Don’t lock me out, God’. I don’t want to be on the other side. I feel like I have been given a second chance.”
Then, after the accident, he decided to invite over a pastor he knew to hear what he had to say. “I felt like I needed to be prayed for. So I called Kabelo and I told him how I was feeling. He came to the house and he gave me a perspective of life and faith that I never knew existed,” Maphumulo explained. He recounted, “After he shared a Scripture, he asked, ‘Gentlemen, are you ready to receive Christ as your savior?'”
After receiving assurances from the pastor that those who are saved should not be cruel and judgemental but saved by God’s grace, Maphumulo converted to Christianity. Explaining that wonderful moment, he recounted, “He told us that ‘the first thing you need to do to walk this journey is to put Jesus in your heart’ and that’s when I accepted the call.”
Featured image credit: By Andy Vuyo – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48549123