African Grandmother's Understanding of Motherhood & Attachment

African perspectives of mothering and attachment have only started being explored recently. Conversely there has been extensive research on Western understandings of attachment and mothering from a psychoanalytic perspective. Due to the limited literature little is known whether psychoanalytic theories can be related to African cultural perspectives of mothering and attachment. This study aimed to understand African grandmothers’ cultural knowledge of mothering and attachment through a psychoanalytic attachment theory perspective. Secondly the study intended to describe the points of convergence and divergence between psychoanalytic concepts of attachment and African grandmothers’ cultural knowledge on mothering. From a psychoanalytic attachment theory perspective the research was able to demonstrate the convergences and divergences between psychoanalytic concepts of mothering and African cultural understandings of mothering thereby illustrating how there is room for dialogue between the two.