A video tour of The Kenya High School by one of its former students has set Kenyan social media talking, with thousands of viewers comparing the Nairobi girls' school's swimming pool, gym and well-stocked canteen with the far humbler facilities they remember from their own school days.

The creator, who posts on TikTok as @thetravellingdoctor1, returned to her old school to collect her Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) certificate and turned the errand into a full walk-through of the campus, TUKO.co.ke reported. In the clip she tells viewers she scored "a grade A of 84 points" before guiding them around the compound.

Pool, gym and a "supermarket" canteen

Walking along paved paths, she points out the chapel and dining hall near the entrance, then a canteen that, in her words, "had everything – cookies, yoghurt. It was like a supermarket."

The tour moves on to the school swimming pool. "We had mandatory swimming classes," she says, explaining that the building behind the pool houses the gym. Viewers are also shown tidy dormitories, a garden, a staffroom area lined with plants, rows of outdoor lockers and several laboratories, including dedicated music and art labs.

In her caption, the creator pitched the video partly at parents considering the school for their daughters, joking in Sheng that most viewers' schools had neither a gym nor a pool. She also noted that the campus is far bigger than it looks, saying the walk from the boarding houses to the classrooms was a workout in itself. The post has drawn well over 100,000 likes and thousands of comments.

"A counterfeit high school"

The comments section quickly became a space for Kenyans to poke fun at their own experiences. TUKO highlighted several of the reactions:

"It's like I went to a counterfeit high school," wrote one user, @s.i.d.e.l.l.

Another, @_sikwasi_, asked: "What am I seeing? Is it a hotel in Diani?" A third, @boy_hass.an, recalled that their canteen "just had soda and ngumu," a reference to the hard buns sold in many Kenyan schools, while @mugo.kenn simply asked: "Weh, where did I study?"

A national school with a long history

The Kenya High School, located in Nairobi's Kileleshwa area and popularly known as "Boma," is one of the country's oldest and most selective national schools for girls. It routinely ranks among the top performers in KCSE and admits students from across the country through the national school placement system.

The reactions to the video touch on a long-running conversation in Kenya about inequality between schools. While well-resourced national schools such as Kenya High can offer facilities like swimming pools and specialised laboratories, many sub-county and day schools struggle with basic needs. That gap is particularly visible this month, as secondary school heads report capitation shortfalls that have forced some institutions to buy materials for national examinations on credit.

For most viewers, however, the video was less a policy debate than a moment of good-humoured nostalgia, and a glimpse inside a school many have only heard about.

The school administration has not publicly commented on the video.

Photos: The Kenya High School main gate (Lilly Stein / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0); TikTok creator @thetravellingdoctor1 (via TUKO.co.ke / TikTok).