Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, her bio says she's from Kenya. Which is, you know, in Africa. So she certainly doesn't represent "The West" here, and it's quite possible English isn't her first language.

Many languages don't really have a distinction between "South X" and "Southern X". And in English we do use "West Africa", "East Africa", and "North Africa" to refer to entire regions with multiple countries. So it's not entirely unreasonable to assume that "South Africa" refers to the whole region.

South America is a continent, South Asia is a region, South Africa is a country, and South Australia is a state. That's not necessarily easy to keep straight.