[Excerpt] Ebrahim is a Zimbabwean of Indian descent and was the last non-black judge in the Supreme Court.
The judiciary has been under growing pressure by the government to issue rulings in its favor and government officials described the decision Ebrahim oversaw as ``a rotten fish''.
Justice ministry officials said Ebrahim submitted a letter of resignation stating he would be taking leave before retiring from the court in May.
Ebrahim is the fifth senior judge to quit in the past year.
Among senior judges to have left the bench recently is former Chief Justice Anthony Gubbay. He was forced to take early retirement last July after the government warned him and other judges they would not be protected from ruling party militants, who stormed the Supreme Court in December 2000, shouting, ``Kill the judges!''
The Supreme Court under Gubbay had declared the government-sanctioned seizure of white-owned farms illegal. The court was accused by militants of bias in favor of white landowners.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court struck down the General Laws Amendment Act, passed by the ruling party in January.
The ruling said the act was improperly pushed through Parliament and violated constitutional and voters rights. It nullified sweeping powers given to state electoral officials and restrictions on election observers and party polling agents.
It also overruled an amendment giving the state sole power to appoint local election monitors and allowed church and other independent groups to deploy monitors at voting and counting stations.
Last year, the government expanded the Supreme Court bench from five to eight judges, in an apparent bid to pack the highest court in the country with sympathetic judges.
Gubbay's successor, Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku, has been accused of openly supporting ruling party policies. [End Excerpt]
"More than 300 years ago, the African was subjugated to colonial rule. In the process, we lost everything, including our right to our own names," the premier of the province, Ngoako Ramatlhodi, told the provincial legislature last month. "With that our sense of self-esteem suffered a massive blow. Part of the task of the liberation struggle is to regain the humanity of the Africans, including their right to call themselves by their own names."
The news was met by howls of protest from Afrikaners, the white descendents of South Africa's Dutch settlers and the architects of the old apartheid regime. They viewed the changes as an attack on their culture. Most offensive, they said, were plans for the provincial capital, Pietersburg - a frontier town of broad avenues and flowering trees named after a white Afrikaner general - to become Polokwane, meaning place of peace.
Pietersburg's white residents, who make up the majority of the city's population, took to the streets in protest, threatening to withhold their taxes if they lost their city's historic name.
"What I want to know is what is really behind this? Is it a message to whites to pack their bags and go? Is it racism?" asked Koos Kemp, the former mayor of Pietersburg, who is leading a fight to defend the old South African names.
The controversy is not isolated to Limpopo province. In recent weeks, South Africa has experienced a wave of name changes proposed by local governments - run by the black majority African National Congress party - who want to reclaim the country's black heritage. [End Excerpt]