My own research led me to believe that the right library to use would be Kombu, as this is also what Celery (mentioned by @SteveMc) has transitioned to. I am also using RabbitMQ and have used Kombu with the default amqplib backend successfully.
Kombu also supports other transports behind the same API. Useful if you need to replace AMQP or add something like redis to the mix. Haven't tried that though.
Sidenote: Kombu does currently not support the latest pika release (should you rely on it for some reason). Only 5.2.0 is currently supported, this bit me a while back.
