O bantuísmo `marimba': da percussão à feitiçaria // The bantuism `marimba': from percussion to witchcraft

African contribution to the lexicon of the Brazilian Portuguese language have been a recurring theme in linguistics since the 19th century. Soares (1942), Mendonça (2012[1933]), Raimundo (1933), and Silva Neto (1950) developed important works considered pioneers of the genre. The 'Glossário de bantuismos brasileiros presumidos', by Angenot et al. (2013), includes the word `marimba' designating `musical instrument', `xylophone species' and `species of drum', recorded in three important dictionaries of the Portuguese language. We show that 'marimba' is a Brazilian bantuism that designates 'percussive musical instrument' and comes from the reconstructed bantu stem  *-d`Ìmbà 'slit drum, lamellophone, (board of) xylophone' with a distribution across almost the entire bantu area (BLR3). It is shown that this stem is derived from a proposed verb °-d`Ìmb- for  'to hit, to strike'. As for the meaning 'witchcraft', beside the already reconstructed form *-dìmbà for which we have refined the meaning to  '(ingrediente for) charm', two different stems have been identified: °-dèmbà, from cognates in various bantu subregions and in the bantuisms of Brazil, and °-d`Ìmbà identical to that of the musical instrument. Therefore, although it is common to find the musical instrument `marimba' also used for witchcraft and, in some languages, identical reflexes for meanings related to these two contexts, distinct stems should also be reconstructed in Bantu. The two latter osculent forms has revealed a possible link with verb stems and they attest a derivation in cl. 1/2 with the meaning 'witch'.