So, first off, stop thinking of these communities as the "then less developed parts of the world" in the time period you're talking about. Between 1450 and 1650, at least some West, Equatorial, Southern and East African trading communities were an important part of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean commercial worlds respectively and by no means could be easily regarded as peripheral or "less developed" in relationship to similar ports or communities in the Americas, Mediterranean or Western Europe. Past that point, European communities and some of their American colonial population centers began to really build up as a result of shifting patterns of global exchange, but even then, the places you have in mind were in some cases substantial cosmopolitan communities with a fair amount of wealth passing through them.

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Toby Green has recently offered a very useful reinterpretation of coastal West African trading communities connected to Portuguese trade in his books Brokers of Change and The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa. Green argues that some of the communities that Portuguese sailors traded with had already been transformed into "creolized", cosmopolitan, multi-cultural communities by the arrival of Mande-speaking merchants, soldiers, craftspeople and Islamic scholars coming from the upper Niger region--a development that Walter Rodney also wrote about in his much earlier work on the "Upper Guinea coast" prior to and during the early Atlantic slave trade. Green's interpretation is that this allowed Portuguese merchants and sailors to reside in some of these coastal towns because there was in some sense already a practice or pattern of 'foreign' merchants and others being there.

Something somewhat similar happened in Portuguese trading posts in Central and East Africa, though Portuguese influence within the Kingdom of Kongo was much more pronounced, particularly after the rulers of Kongo converted to Catholicism. In all of the trading settlements where the Portuguese were active, they intermarried or had children, and so in relatively short order there was a Luso-African creole elite who became a major presence in West and Central Africa and in the Zambezi valley in southeastern Africa.

In terms of everyday life, in this era, these communities generally had a significant population of permanent residents who were in some sense 'creoles', with ties to two or more of the societies intersecting through the community--Portugal, other Europeans like the Dutch or English, representatives of major large-scale states in the nearby hinterland (Mali, various Wolof kingdoms, Oyo, Kongo, the Mwenemutapa state, etc.), people drawn from local communities right around the trading port, and a mix of slave and free populations drawn from a variety of communities throughout the entire region (say, all of Senegambia, all of the lower Niger, the hinterlands of southeast Africa, etc.). In the case of East African trading ports, the main population would have been Swahili-speakers and there would also have been trading communities from Western India and the Red Sea region.

Some of the people in these communities would also be more temporary residents--representatives of European mercantile organizations, missionaries, bureaucrats, sailors, though they might live for many years there. And there also often would have been one or more trading ships anchored nearby (since there were very few good harbors on the West African coast, often they would not have been directly moored at the town) whose crew would be in town at least sometimes. Nearby communities that were not directly hosting traders etc. would also often have people carrying food or other products to markets, or would be involved in some form of commercial activity during the day. Caravans carrying products from further away would also be in town, and increasingly as the 17th Century wore on, those would have been slaving caravans.

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These communities largely existed at the permission of local African rulers, and were frequently involved in some form of leasing arrangement with those rulers. Only in a few cases did the Portuguese shift over towards asserting territorial rights backed by force of arms (in the Zambezi Valley, in Angola) and these episodes often ended up with some form of overreach or military defeat, leading to retrenchment. Trading communities in West Africa especially were keen not to offend or annoy local rulers both to avoid expensive military conflicts and because that would often lead to a cutoff of trade.

By the 16th Century, some of these trading communities would have had a few substantial buildings erected by European traders--a church, probably; possibly a "factory" (an older meaning of the word: a warehouse or post for a factor, the representative of a mercantile company); possibly a small fortification (intended for defense against European competitors, not against Africans). Africa, creole and European residents also built homes of various permanence. (East Africa's a completely different story in this regard, in that there were already "stone towns" up and down the coast on islands and coastal areas long before the Portuguese arrived.)

If you want a good feel for what life was like in these communities, Randy Sparks' recent book Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade, is a good read. It's a bit later than the period you have in mind (it covers the early 18th Century up to the 1760s, at the height of the Atlantic slave trade), but much of what he describes applies to settlements in the previous century. Sparks writes about Anomabu (then spelled Annamaboe), in what is now Ghana, which Sparks argues was comparable in size and importance to North American communities of the time like Charleston SC and Newport RI. Another good read that offers similar insight is Robin Law, Ouidah, which covers the 18th and early 19th Century history of a pivotal slaving port dominated by the kingdom of Dahomey (contemporary Benin).

As far as primary sources go, for the most part they are a bit later and a bit more fragmentary. Many people read Mungo Park's famous travel narrative to get some insight into life in Senegambia at the very end of the historical frame you're interested in. There's a good collection of Portuguese communications from the first century or so of their contacts with southern Africa that was published by the National Archives of Zimbabwe (originally when it was still Rhodesia) that quite a few libraries have, and some collections of mercantile correspondences from later on in West Africa, though these often will not give you a great sense of everyday life. Perhaps the most interesting thing to read in this respect is The Diary of Antera Duke , by an Efik-speaking trader who operated out of Old Calabar in the Niger Delta.