If you want to know why the townships exist, you should probably research it. What I've pieced together from reading and listening, probably full of inaccuracies and assumptions: during apartheid, the white government, ostensibly to prevent crime, made it legal for people of various races to live only in certain areas. The non-white areas were far too small for the size of the population (SA is 80% black) and there was unsufficient housing, leading to people building these shacks. The government promised houses, which took a long time to receive, and the shacks were supposed to be interim housing. Now the post-apartheid government is still supposed to be providing housing, but it's going slowly. The last picture is of "Mandela houses", two room government built houses that people have waited years to get into.
What the townships are like (to look at): The shacks are small and crowded together. There were a lot of kids running around when we were there because school had just let out. There are cows, goats, and dogs (and all the ones we saw were emaciated) wandering the streets. Generally the parents (if both are there) will share a bed smaller than our twin beds. The kids sleep on the floor. It all sounds so earthy and indigenous, but that's not because they want it to be that way and they are living off the land or something. Sometimes we could see inside the shacks, and they would have TV's inside.
One of the cool things our tour guide showed us is the Red Location Museum. (In the midst of the Red Location, so called because the iron of the shacks rusted and eventually most of the shacks were red.) This is a museum about apartheid, there are pictures of various famous events and people, different ways of telling stories - an interactive museum, in the middle of a very poor place. An example of a well-intentioned, well done project to both commemorate something South Africans went through and give the people in the area a way of getting some money. Bradley (the tour guide) is very involved in trying to make the right connections for the township people to take advantage of the tourist industry. Because after all that, we saw this through bus windows. We were tourists, and we clearly didn't belong there, as evidenced by the kids waving excitedly at us and dancing and chasing our bus.
Mandela houses:
This last is a woman making "smileys": it's a sheep's head; when grilled, since the lips have a lot of fat, they shrivel up and show the teeth. Our tour guide, Bradley, said you have a concrete mixer for a stomach to eat one. So I'm considering it.
Pendla, the school we volunteer at on Mondays and Tuesdays, is in this kind of area, serving these kinds of kids, so maybe if I read this again in May it will seem all wrong. But speaking of kids, here are some cute ones we saw hanging around the museum:
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