Parental care in snakes usually stops at hatching, and in most species stops well before. The African rock python and its southern relative go further. Females brood the clutch by coiling around it, and a seven-year radio-tracking study at Dinokeng Game Reserve in South Africa documented mothers staying with their hatchlings in the nest burrow for roughly a fortnight after emergence.
The animals in that study were southern African pythons, Python natalensis, which until recently were treated as a subspecies of Python sebae and which replace it across southern Africa. Neonates basked near the burrow mouth by day and returned to the mother's coils at night. The cost was heavy: brooding females fasted for more than six months and lost roughly forty per cent of their body mass, and they did not breed annually.
Whether the African rock python itself attends hatchlings has not been tested; the observation stands for its close relative. Both are hunted for skin, meat and traditional medicine and killed near settlements, and care of this kind is easily undercounted, because it happens inside burrows and termite mounds where it is difficult to observe.