Oblique collision at about 1.1 Ga along the southern margin of the Kaapvaal continent,south-east Africa

The 1.1 Ga Natal Metamorphic Province (NMP) lies at the heart of a world-wide system of Grenville age mobile belts which welded early continental fragments into the Mesoproterozoic supercontinent of Rodinia. Structural analysis of the three tectonostratigraphic terranes in Natal reveals a kinematic history characterized by prolonged NE-SW plate convergence, manifested as early thrust tectonics and later pervasive sinistral transcurrent shearing. Consequently, superimposed on the Natal tectonostratigraphic terranes is a kinematic subdivision into tectonic domains which are characterized by shallow, south-west dipping foliations, south-west plunging stretching lineations and north-east verging recumbent folds, and by younger domains with subvertical shear fabrics, subhorizontal to oblique lineations and folding about near-vertical axes. Microtextural and petrographic analyses suggest that the later shearing took place under high temperature conditions of at least 500°C. The recorded kinematic indicators suggest that early subhorizontal compressional tectonics gave rise to tectonic thickening of the crust, progressively followed by oblique transcurrent shearing within a transpressional regime. The shearing event in the southern arc-related terranes was associated with the widespread emplacement of late kinematic rapakivi granite -charnockite plutons, with A-type granite geochemical characteristics. This orogenic event took place around 1100 Ma during prolonged NE-SW collisional convergence along the southern margin of the stable Archean foreland, which lay to the north.